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I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

anthony.noided.media

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Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#121

Post by rep_lodsb »

daze42 wrote: post #84
empressplay wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that. It's ultimately a military technology. The end-game here is to use it offensively and / or defensively against other countries. Whoever establishes dominance first wins. And so you have to push adoption, so that it gets tested and can be iterated. But this isn't about making money (they are losing it like crazy!) This is end-of-the world shit and about whoever will be left standing once all the…

This 100%. We're in the middle of an AI Manhattan Project and if "we" give up or slow down, another company or country will get AGI before "us" and there's no coming back after that. If there's a chance AGI is possible, it doesn't make sense to let someone else take the lead no matter how dangerous it could be.

The better analogy would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Stargate

"If there's a chance psychic powers are real..."

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#122

Post by SmirkingRevenge »

Almost hard to remember now, but many tech companies used to be well liked - even Facebook at one time. The negative externalities of social media or smartphones were not apparent right away. But now people live with them daily

So feelings have soured and tech seems more dystopian. Any new disruptive technology is bound to be looked upon with greater baseline cynicism, no matter how magical. That's just baked in now, I think.

When it comes to AI, many people are experiencing all the negative externalities first, in the form of scams, slop, plagiarism, fake content - before they experience it as a useful tool.

So it's just making many people's lives slightly worse from the outset, at least for now

Add all that on top of the issues the OP raises and you can see why so many are have bad feelings about it

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#123

Post by eckesicle »

dgxyz wrote: post #78
mjr00 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. I'm actually a big fan of Claude/Codex and use them extensively. The author of the article says the same. > To be clear: I like and use AI when it comes to coding, and even for other tasks. I think it’s been very effective at increasing my productivity—not as effective as the influencers claim it should be, but effective nonetheless. It's hard to get measured opinions. The most vocal opinions online are either…

Well I've just watched two major projects fail which were running mostly on faith because someone read too many "I used 15 AI agents to vibe code..." blog posts and sold it to management. The promoters have a deep technical understanding of the problem domain we have but little understanding of what an LLM can achieve or what it can understand relating to the problem at hand. Yes you can indeed vibe code a startup. B…

My experience has been a mixed bag.

AI has led us into a deep spaghetti hole in one product where it was allowed free rein. But when applied to localised contexts. Sort of a class at a time it’s really excellent and productivity explodes.

I mostly use it to type out implementations of individual methods after it has suggested interfaces that I modify by hand. Then it writes the tests for me too very quickly.

As soon as you let it do more though, it will invariably tie itself into a knot - all the while confidently ascertaining that it knows what it’s doing.

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#124

Post by AstroBen »

brabel wrote: post #22
mjr00 wrote: post #3

> Microsoft’s AI CEO is saying AI is going to take everybody’s job. And Sam Altman is saying that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs. ANd Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, “kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people”. > I legitimately feel like I am going insane when I hear AI technologists talk about the technology. They’re supposed to market it.…

Can confirm. We don’t know if AI really is about to make programmers who write code by hand obsolete, but we sure as hell fear our competitors will ship features 10x faster than us. What is the logical next step?? Invest lots of money on AI or keep hoping it’s a fad and risk being left in the dust, even if you think that risk is fairly small?

Why is it an all or nothing decision?

Do a small test: if you're 10x faster then keep going. If not, shelve it for a while and maybe try again later

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#125

Post by dgxyz »

sweetheart wrote: post #92
dgxyz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps stop entering into saturated markets and using AI to try and shortcut your way to the moon? There's no way any LLM code generator can replace a moderately complex system at this point and looking at the rate of progress this hasn't improved recently at all. Getting one to reason about a simple part of a business domain is still quite difficult.

The recent developments of only the last 3 months have been staggering. I think you should challenge your beliefs on this a little bit. I don't say that as an AI fanboy (if those exist), it's just really, really noticeable how much progress has been made in doing more complex SWE work, especially if you just ask the LLM to implement some basic custom harness engineering.

I'll let you know in 12 months when we have been using it for long enough to have another abortion for me to clean up.

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#126

Post by prewett »

verdverm wrote: post #52
mullingitover wrote: post #19

AI is scary, but look on the bright side: Whenever there is a massive paradigm shift in technology like we have with AI today, there are absolutely massive, devastating wars because the existing strategic stalemates are broken. Industrialized precision manufacturing? Now we have to figure out who can make the most rifles and machine guns. Industrialized manufacturing of high explosives? Time to have a whole world war…

Where were the massive devastating wars last time this happened with the internet and mobile phone?

Just for the sake of argument, I don't think the internet and mobile phones are military technologies, nor to GP use those examples.

> Industrialized manufacturing of electronics?

Ukraine seems to be exploring this and rewriting military doctrine. The Iranian drones the Russians are using seem to be effective, too. The US has drones, too, and we've discovered that drone bombing is not helpful with insurgencies; we haven't been in any actual wars for a while, though.

> Industrialized manufacturing of intelligence

I don't think we've gotten far enough to discover how/if this is effective. If GP means AI, then we have no idea. If GP means fake news via social media, then we may already be seeing the beginning effects. Both Obama and Trump had a lot of their support from the social media.

Having written this, I think I flatly disagree with GP that technology causes wars because of its power. I think it may enable some wars because of its power differential, but I think a lot is discovered through war. WWI discovered the limitations of industrial warfare, also of chemical weapons. Ukraine is showing what constellations of mini drones (as opposed to the US' solitary maxi-drones) can do, simply because they are outnumbered and forced to get creative.

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#127

Post by SoftTalker »

viccis wrote: post #18
bubblewand wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also what OpenAI’s “safety” angle was all about. “Ohhhh this is so scary! It’s so powerful we have to be very careful with it!” (Buy our stuff or be left behind, Mr. CEO, and invest in us now or lose out)

Anthropic has been the most histrionic about this, with their big blog post about how they need to make sure their models don't feel like they are being emotionally abused by the users being the most fatuous example.

I was taken aback when I recently noticed a co-worker thanking ChatGPT for its answer.

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#128

Post by DrewADesign »

dgxyz wrote: post #78
mjr00 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. I'm actually a big fan of Claude/Codex and use them extensively. The author of the article says the same. > To be clear: I like and use AI when it comes to coding, and even for other tasks. I think it’s been very effective at increasing my productivity—not as effective as the influencers claim it should be, but effective nonetheless. It's hard to get measured opinions. The most vocal opinions online are either…

Well I've just watched two major projects fail which were running mostly on faith because someone read too many "I used 15 AI agents to vibe code..." blog posts and sold it to management. The promoters have a deep technical understanding of the problem domain we have but little understanding of what an LLM can achieve or what it can understand relating to the problem at hand. Yes you can indeed vibe code a startup. B…

Rather than making a good product that’s useful to the world, the goal of current startups seems to be milking VCs who are desperately searching for the new version of the mobile phone revolution that will make this all ok… so it seems like they’re accomplishing their goal?

I reckon the reason the VC rhetoric has reached running-hair-dye-Giuliani-speech level absurdity isn’t because they’re trying to convince other people— it’s because they’re trying to convince themselves. I’d think it was funny as hell if my IRA wasn’t on the line.

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#129

Post by crassus_ed »

Nice read! The main benefit for me is the reduced search times for anything I need to look up online. Especially for code you can find relevant information ware more quickly.

One improvement for your writing style: it was clear to me that you don’t hate AI though, you didn’t have to mention that so many times in your story.

Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

#130

Post by dgxyz »

eckesicle wrote: post #123
dgxyz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I've just watched two major projects fail which were running mostly on faith because someone read too many "I used 15 AI agents to vibe code..." blog posts and sold it to management. The promoters have a deep technical understanding of the problem domain we have but little understanding of what an LLM can achieve or what it can understand relating to the problem at hand. Yes you can indeed vibe code a startup. B…

My experience has been a mixed bag. AI has led us into a deep spaghetti hole in one product where it was allowed free rein. But when applied to localised contexts. Sort of a class at a time it’s really excellent and productivity explodes. I mostly use it to type out implementations of individual methods after it has suggested interfaces that I modify by hand. Then it writes the tests for me too very quickly. As soon…

On localised context stuff, yeah no. I spent a couple of hours rewriting something Claude did terribly a couple of weeks back. Sure it solved the problem, a relatively simple regression analysis, but it was so slow that it crapped out under load. Cue emergency rewrite by hand. 20s latency down to 18ms. Yeah it was that bad.
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