221–230 of 268 posts
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How do you know up front who will find the best use cases? Both approaches can work.
I'd bet my life savings that the person who is forced to use a tool by top-down edict is less likely to find a valuable use case than the person who is sincerely curious about said tool.
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For a small case, a colleague took a screenshot of waves in the waveform viewer and pasted it into the AI tool. It worked. But for large cases, use tools to extract all interfaces from the waveform file and save it as a text file, or add $display statements in the Verilog itself to dump the transactions. A SOTA LLM will eat it up. You point it to the RTL, a log file with hundreds of thousands of lines, and give it a…
Have you tried to change your HDL to something more modern like Bluespec System Verilog or, god forbid, anything embedded into Haskell or Scala? I read that BSV source code is about three times shorter than similar design in Verilog and also has three times smaller defect density (defects per significant line of code). So just by changing the HDL from Verilog to BSV one can have nine (9) times less defects in the des…
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Exactly. That's the problem ICs don't want to admit. Managing a lot of people at scale is messy and you have to use crude solutions. It's impossible to know everything that's going on. If you were a manager you wouldn't do any better. Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
Your argument that bad processes can't possibly be improved is contradicted by all of recorded history.
But more specifically ICs tend to want to say "if you just let me do what I know is right it would be fine." That's a trade-off, too, though. That solution means a lot of people will be messing around due to no accountability.
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So my assessment of the current mania is that it’s basically a management variant of Pascal’s wager. If you as a “leader” refuse to go along with the crowd and you’re right, then after the dust settles you look like someone who guessed right. Oh and now we’re in a recession so you are probably having a bad time regardless. You maybe get one promotion, congratulations. If you refuse to go along with the crowd and you’…
Yes, leaders can & should be expected to devise experiments to determine what processes might possibly be optimized though AI-assistance. But doing so properly requires expending a serious amount of cognitive effort & agile methodology, which is the exact opposite of what Amazon's management has demonstrated here.
I have mixed thoughts on this. These thoughts are my own. On the one hand, it’s objectively silly to pretend like we’ve solved the age old problem of measuring developer productivity. Metric-obsessed leadership can also be intolerable, counterproductive, and it’s a good way to paint yourself into a corner undervaluing your best talent and overvaluing your mediocre talent. That said, I’m kind of having a blast using C…
Could you list us some of the capabilities you use that bring value besides “summarize my email”
The fact that management signed off on measuring AI use through token usage shows how incompetent management really is, including in allegedly technical conmpanies like Amazon. Tokenmaxxing was an entirely expected and rational response. IOW You measure employees in stupid ways, you're going to get stupid behaviour as a consequence.
The moment they made it a metric they failed to do anything useful.
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One argument I have heard in favour of this is that management knew this would be a side effect, but that it's more important to have people engage with AI as much as possible simply to explore what is actually possible. You are effectively knowingly wasting money in the expectation that you might learn something useful that will be more valuable in the long run.
Exactly. That's the problem ICs don't want to admit. Managing a lot of people at scale is messy and you have to use crude solutions. It's impossible to know everything that's going on. If you were a manager you wouldn't do any better. Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
I was thinking about this recently. I tend to run my AI at low context because the documentation states that they degrade with higher context usage. However I see tons of people on LinkedIn with ways of backing up context, not wanting to lose context, etc. This seems like another way the system is being misused. Higher context usage also uses more tokens. I suspect you get worse (and slower) output too than a dense d…
“Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.” ― Charlie Munger
The fact that management signed off on measuring AI use through token usage shows how incompetent management really is, including in allegedly technical conmpanies like Amazon. Tokenmaxxing was an entirely expected and rational response. IOW You measure employees in stupid ways, you're going to get stupid behaviour as a consequence.
So my assessment of the current mania is that it’s basically a management variant of Pascal’s wager. If you as a “leader” refuse to go along with the crowd and you’re right, then after the dust settles you look like someone who guessed right. Oh and now we’re in a recession so you are probably having a bad time regardless. You maybe get one promotion, congratulations. If you refuse to go along with the crowd and you’…