It’s like you saw all the evidence and drew the conclusion you were most comfortable with, despite what the evidence suggests.
Everyone in Seattle hates AI
111–120 of 1001 posts
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#112Author here if anyone has thoughts
I was under the distinct impression that Seattle was somewhat divided over 'big tech', with many long-term residents resenting Microsoft and Amazon's impact on the city (and longing for the 'artsy and free-spirited' place it used to be). Do you think those non-techies are sympathetic to the Microsofties and Amazonians? This is a genuine question, as I've never lived in Seattle, but I visit often, and live in the PNW.
> Do you think those non-techies are sympathetic to the Microsofties and Amazonians?
As somebody who has lived in Seattle for over 20 years and spent about 1/3 of it working in big tech (but not either of those companies), no, I don't really think so. There is a lot of resentment, for the same reasons as everywhere else: a substantial big tech presence puts anyone who can't get on the train at a significant economic disadvantage.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's a dichotomy in the software world between real products (which have customers and use cases and make money by giving people things they need) and hype products (which exist to get investors excited, so they'll fork over more money). AI is not both of these things? There are no real AI products that have real customers and make money by giving people what they need? > LLMs are a more substantive technology t…
A way to state this point that you may find less uncharitable is that a lot of current LLM applications are just very thin shells around ChatGPT and the like. In those cases the actual "new" technology (ie, not the underlying ai necessarily) is not as substantive and novel (to me at least) as a product whose internals are not just an (existing) llm. (And I do want to clarify that, to me personally, this tendency towa…
Shells around chatgpt are fine if they provide value.
Way better than AI jammed into every crevice for no reason.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#114> But then I realized this was bigger than one conversation. Every time I shared Wanderfugl with a Seattle engineer, I got the same reflexive, critical, negative response. This wasn't true in Bali, Tokyo, Paris, or San Francisco—people were curious, engaged, wanted to understand what I was building. But in Seattle? Instant hostility the moment they heard "AI." So what's different between Seattle and San Francisco? Do…
Seattle has always been a second-mover when it comes to hype and reality distortion. There is a lot more echo chamber fervor (and, more importantly, lots of available FOMO money to burn) in SF around whatever the latest hotness is.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#115> 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…
Oh but we're all supposed to swoon over the author's ability to make ANOTHER AI powered mapping solution! Probably vibecoded and bloated too. Just what we need, obviously all the haters are wrong! /s
Honestly if it's using a swiss-army-knife framework it's already bloated.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#116Was this written by AI? It sounds like the writing style of an elementary school student. Almost entirely made of really simple sentence structures, and for whatever reason I find it really annoying to read.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#117206dev here...
Oh yeah, call out a tech city and all the butt-hurt-ness comes out. Perfect example of "Rage Bait".
People here aren't hurt because of AI - people here are hurt because they learned they were just line items in a budget.
When the interest rates went up in 2022/2023 and the cheap money went away, businesses had to pivot their taxes while appeasing the shareholder.
Remember that time when Satya went to a company sponsored rich people thing with Aerosmith or whomever playing while announcing thousands of FTE's being laid off? Yeah, that...
If your job can be done by a very small shell script, why wasn't it done before?
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the latest tech holy war. Tabs vs Spaces but more existential. I'm usually anti hype and I've been convinced of AI's use over and over when it comes to coding. And whenever I talk about it, I see that I come across as an evangelist. Some people appreciate that, online I get a lot of push back despite having tangible examples of how it has been useful.
Right this is what I can’t quite understand. A lot of HN folks appear to have been burned by e.g. horrible corporate or business ideas by non technical people that don’t understand AI, that is completely understandable. What I never understand is the population of coders that don’t see any value in coding agents or are aggressively against them, or people that deride LLMs as failing to be able to do X (or hallucinate…
> What I never understand is the population of coders that don’t see any value in coding agents or are aggressively against them, or people that deride LLMs as failing to be able to do X (or hallucinate etc) and are therefore useless and every thing is AI Slop, without recognizing that what we can do today is almost unrecognizeable from the world of 3 years ago.
I don't recognize that because it isn't true. I try the LLMs every now and then, and they still make the same stupid hallucinations that ChatGPT did on day 1. AI hype proponents love to make claims that the tech has improved a ton, but based on my experience trying to use it those claims are completely baseless.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the latest tech holy war. Tabs vs Spaces but more existential. I'm usually anti hype and I've been convinced of AI's use over and over when it comes to coding. And whenever I talk about it, I see that I come across as an evangelist. Some people appreciate that, online I get a lot of push back despite having tangible examples of how it has been useful.
Right this is what I can’t quite understand. A lot of HN folks appear to have been burned by e.g. horrible corporate or business ideas by non technical people that don’t understand AI, that is completely understandable. What I never understand is the population of coders that don’t see any value in coding agents or are aggressively against them, or people that deride LLMs as failing to be able to do X (or hallucinate…
> Predictions of “2025 is the year of coding agents” from a chorus of otherwise unpalatable CEOs was in fact absolutely true…
... but maybe not in the way that these CEOs had hoped.[0]
Part of the AI fatigue is that busy, competent devs are getting swarmed with massive amounts of slop from not-very-good developers. Or product managers getting 5 paragraphs of GenAI bug reports instead of a clear and concise explanation.
I have high hopes for AI and think generative tooling is extremely useful in the right hands. But it is extremely concerning that AI is allowing some of the worst, least competent people to generate an order of magnitude more "content" with little awareness of how bad it is.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#120[flagged]