251–260 of 320 posts
Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progre…
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> And who hasn't seen productivity gains from more established AI technology You have to be very careful about claiming productivity gains. There may have been some instances of gains in a specific part of a workflow but does it slow down others or result in overall gains is yet to be empirically measured and validated. We’re seeing metrics like more lines of code, better unit tests, documentation, faster PRs etc. bu…
These things have been "good" for a while now. And yet, companies like Amazon and Microsoft aren't showing significant improvement in their most visible products. If it's not obviously showing for the all-in, AI-selling companies, I simply don't expect serious improvement for everyone else. They're undeniably neat tools, but so far there's no observable evidence that they're transformative.
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> - "Add these domains with these mailboxes to an SMTP server running on my homelab, forward all incoming and outgoing via mxroute" I laughed reading this. Have you actually tried it? I recently tried to get Claude (Opus) to give me a setup for a simple SMTP relay with Postfix. I had to constantly fight it not to include completely unnecessary components and configurations like Dovecot or just override my requirement…
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Definitely incomprehensible that someone might have a different take than you about the 'goodness' of your prompt outcome...
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> - "Add these domains with these mailboxes to an SMTP server running on my homelab, forward all incoming and outgoing via mxroute" I laughed reading this. Have you actually tried it? I recently tried to get Claude (Opus) to give me a setup for a simple SMTP relay with Postfix. I had to constantly fight it not to include completely unnecessary components and configurations like Dovecot or just override my requirement…
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I'm personally much more towards the "I struggle to get it to work well" side, but there have been so many anecdotes from people who are earnestly saying it does all their work for them and that they hit enter, go to bed, and wake up to working software. I'm trying to imagine a hammer or band saw that produces such wildly different results in the hands of different users.
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Even as a teenager the singularity didn't make sense to me. Why would AI capabilities suddenly improve by an astronomical amount? It's still going to be running on hardware and software that we (humans) design. Even if AI reached parity with human brains it would still need to improve efficiency by orders of magnitude to reach parity with human society's output. And only then could it start to outpace the improvement…
The singularity is the tipping point where the AI can improve itself faster than humans can comprehend, so the software at least wouldn't be human-designed anymore. It requires a level of self-driven intent and access to their own code LLMs aren't capable of on their own. They might be one component of such a future system though, we just don't know yet. Even then it would probably take quite a while to reach that ti…
Silver lining is that if it goes bad we probably won't live long (as a species) to say "I told you so"
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I'm not sure why my experience differs from yours. When I was in the northeast recently I got into heated arguments with people, one person said they "hated Waymo" and refused to elaborate (but also said they used AI everyday for work), another said flat out that technology is evil, so I asked them if poor people should go without electricity. Then they restricted their argument to AI is evil, and that was a more nua…
If you were in NYC, some of this may be a Boston/NYC difference. NYC is much more anti-Waymo (which I interpret mostly as an extension of being much more anti-car in general). There are also substantially different cultures between the two re: art and finance, which may have reflected on the AI questions. I don't think you can decouple Trump from himself in this way without a concrete explanation. If some factor caus…
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> " And old folks said the same thing about the internet and smart phones. " Ironic how LLM promoters like to hallucinate citations, much like the tools they espouse.
"Internet 'may be just a passing fad as millions give up on it'" - Daily Mail, December 2000 I recall seeing similar sentiment in other publications throughout the late 90s. https://www.reddit.com/r/retrocomputing/comments/1m6i4ui/art... (Apologies that this was the best image host I could find for it)
I was there in the 1990s too and we were deluged with headlines trumpeting how everyone, young and old, was rushing headlong onto the Information Superhighway as the dotcom bubble kept inflating.
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Generating code is not, and never was, a bottleneck to projects. Understanding the problem, designing a solution, organizing resources, testing, and customer buy-in and moving targets have always represented the real issues. Now, with LLMs, we're supposed to be able to paper over some or all of these problems. They're supposed to be able to understand and intuitively fill the assumptions present in vague requirements…
> They're supposed to be able to understand and intuitively fill the assumptions present in vague requirements, then produce working applications. They're supposed to shrink the timelines from years and months to weeks and days. They're supposed to replace human expertise with a reliable service. But none of those sound like things that would change how likely any given project is to succeed. Shrinking timelines from…
Most large software projects I've worked on in a professional environment, "writing the code" was one of the fastest and smallest parts of the project. Maybe 10% of the overall calendar time of any given project was "designing and typing in software." The bulk of time spent tends to be working with customers, researching and refining requirements, reviewing the requirements with execs and leads to get their buy-in and support for staffing the project, performing various non-engineering reviews like legal and privacy, aligning timeframes among multiple contributing teams, seeking approval from Director X to move on to the next project phase, waiting for Key Team Member Y to get back from vacation, conducting QA and field testing, soaking the software through various rollout stages like internal, dogfood, internal staging, external beta, and then incremental percentages in prod, while watching and waiting for any regressions or failures. On a project that takes 6 months from idea to 100% in-production, writing the code might take a few weeks of that.
So why are we so focused on a tool that speeds up the smallest part of this process?
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One of the most wild parts of the "Is AI useful" arguments is how different people are getting so astoundingly different results from it. One guy will claim that he can one-shot "Port this unmaintained app from 2017 to modern Android," go do the dishes, and come back to a working application. And the next guy will say, "I can't get it to do anything groundbreaking and have to micro-babysit it every step of the way to…
r/DiWHY
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One of the most wild parts of the "Is AI useful" arguments is how different people are getting so astoundingly different results from it. One guy will claim that he can one-shot "Port this unmaintained app from 2017 to modern Android," go do the dishes, and come back to a working application. And the next guy will say, "I can't get it to do anything groundbreaking and have to micro-babysit it every step of the way to…
So many businesses are pushing AI hard. People with varying levels of job (in)security want to be seen as "leading the charge" into a post-AI era.
LLMs can do some really impressive things, don't get me wrong. But I regularly find massive blunders in the code it produces.
And that actually makes sense if you understand how LLMs operate and the quality of software on GitHub.