Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 1001 posts

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#171

Post by aisengard »

throwout4110 wrote: post #94
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.

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…

There is zero guarantee that these tools will continue to be there. Those of us who are skeptical of the value of the tools may find them somewhat useful, but are quite wary of ripping up the workflows we've built for ourselves over decade(s)(+) in favor of something that might be 10-20% more useful, but could be taken away or charged greater fees or literally collapse in functionality at any moment, leaving us suddenly crippled. I'll keep the thing I know works, I know will always be there (because it's open source, etc), even if it means I'm slightly less productive over the next X amount of time otherwise.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#172

Post by airstrike »

binary132 wrote: post #164
bccdee wrote: post #41

> Engineers don't try because they think they can't. This article assumes that AI is the centre of the universe, failing to understand that that assumption is exactly what's causing the attitude they're pointing to. 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 excite…

Bitcoin is at 93k so I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to say blockchain is insubstantive or without value

If you can't point to real use cases at scale, it's hard to argue it has intrisinc value even though it may have speculative value.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#173

Post by zmmmmm »

As a place with a high density of people with agency to influence the outcome, I think it's important for people here to acknowledge that much of what the negative people think is probably 100% true.

There will absolutely some cases where AI is used well. But probably the larger fraction will be where AI does not give better service, experience or tool. It will be used to give a cheaper but shittier one. This will be a big win for the company or service implementing it, but it will suck for literally everybody else involved.

I really believe there's huge value in implementing AI pervasively. However it's going to be really hard work and probably take 5 years to do it well. We need to take an engineering and human centred approach and do it steadily and incrementally over time. The current semi-religious fervour about implementing it rapidly and recklessly is going to be very harmful in the longer term.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#174

Post by ggerni »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #161
averyvery wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, "Engineers don't try" is a frustrating statement. We've all tried generative AI, and there's not that much to it — you put text in, you get text back out. Some models are better at some tasks, some tools are better at finding the right text and connecting it to the right actions, some tools provide a better wrapper around the text-generation process. Certain jobs are very easy for AI to do, others are impossibl…

This isn’t “unfair”, but you are intentionally underselling it. If you haven’t had a mind blown moment with AI yet, you aren’t doing it right or are anchoring in what you know vs discovering new tech. I’m not making any case for anything, but it’s just not that hard to get excited for something that sure does seem like magic sometimes. Edit: lol this forum :)

[flagged]

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#175

Post by throwout4110 »

elictronic wrote: post #142
throwout4110 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AI is in a hype bubble that will crash just like every other bubble. The underlying uses are there but just like Dot Com, Tulips, subprime mortgages, and even Sir Isaac Newton's failings with the South Sea Company the financial side will fall. This will cause bankruptcies and huge job losses. The argument for and against AI doesn't really matter in the end, because the finances don't make a lick of sense.

Ok sure the bubble/non-bubble stuff, fine, but in terms of “things I’d like to be a part of” it’s hard to imagine a more transformative technology (not to again turn off the anti-hype crowd). But ok, say it’s 1997, you don’t like the valuations you see. But as a tech person you’re not excited by browsers, the internet, the possibilities? You don’t want to be a part of that even if it means a bubble pops? I also hear a lot of people argue “finances don’t make a lick of sense” but i don’t think things are that cut and dried and I don’t see this as obvious. I don’t think really many people know how things will evolve and what size a market correction or bubble would have.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#176

Post by sleepybrett »

side_up_down wrote: post #51

There's a great non-AI point in this article - Seattle has great engineers. In pursuing startups, Seattle engineers are relatively unambitious compared to the Bay Area. By that I mean there's less "shooting for unicorns" and a comparatively more reserved startup culture and environment. I'm not sure why. I don't think it's access to capital, but I'd love to hear thoughts.

My pet theory is that most of the investor class in seattle is ex microsoft and ex amazon. Neither microsoft nor amazon are really big splashy unicorns. Amazon's greatest innovation (aws) isn't even their original line of business and is now 'boring'. No doubt they've innovated all over their business in both little and big ways, but not splashy ways, hell every time amazon tries to splash they seem to fall on their ass more often than not (look at their various cancelled hardware lines, their game studios, etc. Alexa still chugs on, but she's not getting appreciably better to the end user over even the last 10 years).

Microsoft is the same, a generally very practical company just trying to practical company stuff.

All the guys that made their bones, vested and rested and now want to turn some of that windfall into investments likely don't have the kind of risk tolerance it takes to fund a potential unicorn. All smart people I'm sure, smart enough to negotiate big windfalls from ms/az but far less risk tollerant than a guy in SF who made their investment nestegg building some risky unicorn.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#178

Post by Paianni »

mr_toad wrote: post #156
pjmlp wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In European consulting agencies the trend now is to make AI part of each RFP reply, you won't go through the sales team, if AI isn't crammed there as part of the solution being delivered, and we get evaluated for it. This takes all the joy away, even traditional maintenance projects of big corps seems attractive nowadays.

I remember when everything had a have the word ‘digital’ in it. And I’m old enough to remember when ‘multimedia’ was a buzzword that was crammed into anywhere it would fit.

or 'interactive' or 'cloud' (early 2010s).

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#179

Post by paxys »

All big corporate employees hate AI because it is incessantly pushed on them by clueless leadership and mostly makes their job harder. Seattle just happens to have a much larger percent of big tech employees than most other cities (>50% work for Microsoft or Amazon alone). In places like SF this gloom is balanced by the wide eyed optimism of employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google etc. and the thousands of startups piggybacking off of them hoping to make it big.
Post reply on HN