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

My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

fly.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 1001 posts

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#211

Post by avanai »

grey-area wrote: post #169

I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this provide the proof of the unlimited powers of their tools in code. If GAI (or agents, or whatever comes next …) is so effective it should be quite simple to prove that by creating an AI only company and in short order producing huge amounts of serviceable code to do useful things. So far I’ve seen no sign of this, and the best use case seems to…

A "eulogy" is a speech you make at a funeral in honor of the dead person. I think you meant "apology".

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#212

Post by simonw »

rafavento wrote: post #144

There's something that seems to be missing in all these posts and that aligns with my personal experience trying to use AI coding assistants. I think in code. To me, having to translate the into natural language for the LLM to translate it back into code makes very little sense. Am I alone in this camp? What am I missing?

If you think in code, try prompting them in code.

I quite often prompt with code in a different language, or pseudo-code describing roughly what I am trying to achieve, or a Python function signature without the function body.

Or I will paste in a bunch of code I have already written with a comment somewhere that says "TODO: retrieve the information from the GitHub API" and have the model finish it for me.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#213

Post by grose »

ckiely wrote: post #38

The argument that programmers are into piracy and therefore should shut up about theft is nonsensical. Not defending piracy, but at least an artist or creator is still credited and their work is unadulterated. Piracy != plagiarism.

It's also ignoring the fact that much plagiarized code is already under permissive licenses. If Star Wars or Daft Punk were CC-BY-SA nobody would need to pirate them, and there may even be a vibrant remix culture... which is kind of the whole point of open source, is it not?

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#214

Post by omot »

I think of programming languages as an interface between humans and computers. If anything, the industry expanded because of this abstraction. Not everyone has to learn assembly to build cool shit. To me AI is the next step in this abstraction where you don't need to learn programming languages to potentially build cool projects. The hard part of software engineering is scale anyways. My bet is that this will expand the industry in unprecedented ways. Will there be contraction of traditional programming jobs? Absolutely. The growth in tech jobs over the last 20 years weren't more assembly programmers. They were abstraction experts. I'm sure the next wave will be even bigger, professional prompting will explode in size.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#215

Post by mtklein »

retrac wrote: post #3

Machine translation and speech recognition. The state of the art for these is a multi-modal language model. I'm hearing impaired veering on deaf, and I use this technology all day every day. I wanted to watch an old TV series from the 1980s. There are no subtitles available. So I fed the show into a language model (Whisper) and now I have passable subtitles that allow me to watch the show. Am I the only one who remem…

I completely agree that technology in the last couple years has genuinely been fulfilling the promise established in my childhood sci-fi.

The other day, alone in a city I'd never been to before, I snapped a photo of a bistro's daily specials hand-written on a blackboard in Chinese, copied the text right out of the photo, translated it into English, learned how to pronounce the menu item I wanted, and ordered some dinner.

Two years ago this story would have been: notice the special board, realize I don't quite understand all the characters well enough to choose or order, and turn wistfully to the menu to hopefully find something familiar instead. Or skip the bistro and grab a pre-packaged sandwich at a convenience store.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#217

Post by simonw »

slg wrote: post #159

>We imagine artists spending their working hours pushing the limits of expression. But the median artist isn’t producing gallery pieces. They produce on brief: turning out competent illustrations and compositions for magazine covers, museum displays, motion graphics, and game assets. One of the more eye-opening aspects of this technology is finding out how many of my peers seemingly have no understanding or respect f…

How do you mean?

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#218

Post by panorama »

kopecs wrote: post #126

> Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property. Seriously? Is this argument in all earnestl…

It's a fib sequence

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#220

Post by blibble »

> We’re not East Coast dockworkers; we won’t stop progress on our own.

we could choose to be

of course if you're a temporarily embarrassed billionaire like ptacek, you certainly don't want the workers doing this

Post reply on HN