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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#131

Post by Loughla »

suprjami wrote: post #104
hectdev wrote: post #63

Earlier 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.

I don't see it that way. Tabs, spaces, curly brace placement, Vim, Emacs, VSCode, etc are largely aesthetic choices with some marginal unproven cognitive implications. I find people mostly prefer what they are used to, and if your preference was so superior then how could so many people build fantastic software using the method you don't like? AI isn't like that. AI is a bunch of people telling me this product can do…

>AI is certainly not reliable enough for me to jeopardize the quality of my work by using it heavily.

I mean this in sincerity, and not at all snarky, but - have you considered that you haven't used the tools correctly or effectively? I find that I can get what I need from chatbots (and refuse to call them AI until we have general AI just to be contrary) if I spend a couple of minutes considering constraints and being careful with my prompt language.

When I've come across people in my real life who say they get no value from chatbots, it's because they're asking poorly formed questions, or haven't thought through the problem entirely. Working with chatbots is like working with a very bright lab puppy. They're willing to do whatever you want, but they'll definitely piss on the floor unless you tell them not to.

Or am I entirely off base with your experience?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#132

Post by jakubmazanec »

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #49
mips_avatar wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My creative writing teacher in college drilled the m dash into me. I can’t really write without them now

I think the presence of em dashes is a very poor metric for determining if something is AI generated. I'm not sure why it's so popular.

Related article posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46133941 explains it: "Within the A.I.’s training data, the em dash is more likely to appear in texts that have been marked as well-formed, high-quality prose. A.I. works by statistics. If this punctuation mark appears with increased frequency in high-quality writing, then one way to produce your own high-quality writing is to absolutely drench it with the punctuation mark in question. So now, no matter where it’s coming from or why, millions of people recognize the em dash as a sign of zero-effort, low-quality algorithmic slop."

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#133

Post by mips_avatar »

cosmicgadget wrote: post #46
mips_avatar wrote: post #2

Author here if anyone has thoughts

Would love to hear more anecdotes from former colleagues.

One fun one was the leadership of Windows Update became obsessed with shipping AI models via Windows update, but they can't safely ship files larger than 200mb inside of an update.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#134

Post by sulicat »

hectdev wrote: post #63
pkasting wrote: post #40

Ex-Google here; there are many people both current and past-Google that feel the same way as the composite coworker in the linked post. I haven't escaped this mindset myself. I'm convinced there are a small number of places where LLMs make truly effective tools (see: generation of "must be plausible, need not be accurate" data, e.g. concept art or crowd animations in movies), a large number of places where LLMs make…

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.

I'm probably one of the people that would say AI (at least LLMs) isn't all its cracked up to be and even I have examples where it has been useful to me.

I think the feeling stems from the exaggeration of the value it provides combined with a large number of internal corporate LLMs being absolute trash.

The overvaluation is seen in effect everywhere from the stock market, the price of RAM, the cost of energy as well as IP theft issues etc etc. AI has taken over and yet it still feels like just a really good fuzzy search. Like yeah I can search something 10x faster than before but might get a bad answer every now and then.

Yeah its been useful (so have many other things). No it's not worth building trillion dollar data centers for. I would be happier if the spend went towards manufacturing or semiconductor fabs.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#135

Post by IAmBroom »

jimbokun wrote: post #107
hectdev wrote: post #63

Earlier 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.

Most of the people against “AI” are not against it because they think it doesn’t work. It’s because they know it works better every day and the people controlling it are gleefully fucking over the rest of the world because they can. The plainly stated goal is TO ELIMINATE ALL HUMAN EMPLOYEES, with no plan for how those people will feed, clothe, or house themselves. The reactions the author was getting was the reactio…

I don't think you're qualified to speak for most of the people against AI.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#136

Post by MicrosoftShill »

nickff wrote: post #11
mips_avatar wrote: post #2

Author 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.

I've lived in the Seattle area most of my life and lived in San Francisco for a year.

SF embraces tech and in general (politics, etc) has a culture of being willing to try new things. Overall tech hostility is low, but the city becoming a testbed for projects like Waymo is possibly changing that. There is a continuous argument that their free-spirited culture has been cannibalized by tech.

Seattle feels like the complete opposite. Resistant to change, resistant to trying things, and if you say you work in tech you're now a "techbro" and met with eyerolls. This is in part because in Seattle if you are a "techbro" you work for one of the megacorps whereas in SF a "techbro" could be working for any number of cool startups.

As you mentioned, Seattle has also been taken over by said megacorps which has colored the impressions of everyone. When you have entire city blocks taken over by Microsoft/Amazon and the roads congested by them it definitely has some negative domino effects.

As an aside, on TV we in the Seattle area get ads about how much Amazon has been doing for the community. Definitely some PR campaign to keep local hostility low.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#137

Post by pesus »

tptacek wrote: post #76
somekyle2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't doubt that many love it. I'm just going based on SF non-tech people I know, who largely see it as the thing vaguely mentioned on every billboard and bus stop, the chatbot every tech company seems to be trying to wedge into every app, and the thing that makes misleading content on social media and enables cheating on school projects. But, sometimes it is good at summarizing videos and such. I probably have a b…

I can imagine reasons why non-tech people in SF would hate all tech. I work in tech and living in the middle of that was a big part of why I was in such a hurry to get out of there.

Frankly, tech deserves its bad reputation in SF (and worldwide, really).

One look at the dystopian billboards bragging about trying to replace humans with AI should make any sane human angry at what tech has done. Or the rising rents due to an influx of people working on mostly useless AI startups, 90% of which won't be around in 5 years. Or even how poorly many in tech behave in public and how poorly they treat service workers. That's just the tip of the iceberg, and just in SF alone.

I say all this as someone living in SF and working in tech. As a whole, we've brought the hate upon ourselves, and we deserve it.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#138

Post by mips_avatar »

the_af wrote: post #71
mips_avatar wrote: post #2

Author here if anyone has thoughts

Out of curiosity, did you redact this with AI? It has all the telltale signs: lots of em-dashes but also "punched up" paragraphs, a lot of them end with a zinger, e.g. > Amazon folks are slightly more insulated, but not by much. The old Seattle deal—Amazon treats you poorly but pays you more—only masks the rot. or > Seattle has talent as good as anywhere. But in San Francisco, people still believe they can change the…

I wrote it by hand but I had an AI do some edits. I got the m dash drilled into me by my creative writing teacher in college.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#139

Post by wrs »

exmadscientist wrote: post #68
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the presence of em dashes is a very poor metric for determining if something is AI generated. I'm not sure why it's so popular.

For me it is that they are wrongly used in this piece. Em dashes as appositives have the feel of interruption—like this—and are to be used very sparingly. They're a big bump in the narrative's flow, and are to be used only when you want a big bump. Otherwise appositives should be set off with commas, when the appositive is critical to the narrative, or parentheses (for when it isn't). Clause changes are similar—the e…

Ironically, years ago I fell into the habit of using too many non-interrupting em dashes because people thought semicolons were pretentious.

But introductory rhetorical questions? As sentence fragments? There I draw the line.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#140

Post by bigstrat2003 »

empressplay wrote: post #88
kg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know of at least one bigco that will no longer hire anyone, period, who doesn't have at least 6 months of experience using genai to code and isn't enthusiastic about genai. No exceptions. I assume this is probably true of other companies too. I think it makes some amount of sense if you've decided you want to be "an AI company", but it also makes me wary. Apocryphally Google for a long period of time struggled to h…

Like any tool, the longer you use it the better you learn where you can extract value from it and where you can't, where you can leverage it and where you shouldn't. Because your behaviour is linked to what you get out of the LLM, this can be quite individual in nature, and you have to learn to work with it through trial and error. But in the end engineers do appear to become more productive 'pairing' with an LLM, so…

> But in the end engineers do appear to become more productive 'pairing' with an LLM

Quite the opposite: LLMs reduce productivity, they don't increase it. They merely give the illusion of productivity because you can generate code real fast, but that isn't actually useful when you spend time fixing all the mistakes it made. It is absolutely insane that companies are stupid enough to require people use something which cripples them.

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