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

The Generative AI Con

wheresyoured.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 503 posts

Re: The Generative AI Con

#261

Post by skydhash »

levkk wrote: post #91

If my Android (or IPhone) disappeared tomorrow, I would feel like I time traveled back a century. If Google search was gone, I wouldn't be able to do my job anymore. If the cloud disappeared, I wouldn't be able to build apps anymore. There are no workarounds, unless you feel like going to a library...? If ChatGPT disappeared tomorrow (or derivatives like Copilot, etc.), I would be mildly inconvenienced. Then I'd go b…

Before 2015, I didn't have a reliable internet access (as in I can access when I want to, not I have access all the time) or electricity. But I manage to learn much about computers and programming. Why? Because a book is actually a very dense information repository. And the rest, you discover by reading code and manuals. The reason I use the internet today is mostly because no one takes time to polish their library and document it. Instead you have to wade through issues report and forums. Compare that with C, where it's much more slower and you can use man for function names.

The internet is much more faster, but you can do stuff locally if someone took care to download documentations (which I did because of the above reasons).

Re: The Generative AI Con

#263

Post by tasuki »

dzonga wrote: post #69

for people using these AI products for coding what exactly are you doing ? general API plumbing ? call this api, combine the json results & spit it out. Then slap a React / Next.js frontend ? lately, I have been doing your classical business apps - due to the domain rules - ai is pretty useless - but I have found perplexity and deep mind to be smarter stack overflows. that's it.

I tell it the function name, input, output, and an LLM writes the function for me. I prefer to keep an eye on the architectural decisions myself.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#264

Post by adamc »

jcgrillo wrote: post #145
somewhereoutth wrote: post #141

> And when this all falls apart — and I believe it will — there will be a very public reckoning for the tech industry. and will trigger the collapse of the wider asset price bubble, with consequent economic turmoil - an unfortunately necessary reset, in my opinion. I suppose the good news is that likely the current US administration will wear this one, though not completely being their fault (much like Covid), and a…

I'm worried with a slowing housing market (demand is at a 5yr low) there could be a perfect storm of major market crash coupled with plummeting home values.

That might be a good thing. Current housing prices are insane.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#265

Post by whatshisface »

hoseja wrote: post #236
whatshisface wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally it was thought to have shortened a very expensive war, and may have prevented the USSR from taking over Europe by leveraging its unquestioned postwar conventional forces advantage.

Well sure but how much cash did the MaPr corp. make selling their new and improved model implosion-type-u-235?

The profit was made by the private sector in supplying goods to the program. Today, private companies do a lot and earn a lot of money from stockpile maintenance.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#266

Post by tempodox »

hoseja wrote: post #238
namaria wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About the GDP of the US and Europe over the past 80 years so a few quadrillion dollars.

That's not direct return of VC-invested cash that people are refusing to see past in here.

“people … in here” seeing “past it” or not is irrelevant, the VCs won't see past it once they realize that money is lost.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#267

Post by card_zero »

petesergeant wrote: post #139

Article is a motte-and-bailey[0] argument. Bailey (the clickbait): “Generative AI is a con!!” Motte (narrow defendable argument): OpenAI and Anthropic have not shown that building a proprietary model and selling inference is a sustainable business. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

I see, so whenever anybody states their position tersely, I can accuse them of using a motte-and-bailey argument, and force them to be so pedantic and long winded that their point get lost in the weeds. Unless I like what they're saying, of course. I'll keep it in mind!

Re: The Generative AI Con

#268

Post by mplanchard »

sandos wrote: post #205
mplanchard wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of software work is not greenfielding a PoC or reimplementing an existing, small, well-specced project. We’ve had OpenAPI client generators for years after all. The majority of software work is maintaining large, existing products: adding features, fixing bugs, improving performance, etc., or building new software in problem domains that aren’t so well-defined.

In my opinion, AI only really helps you (a lot) if you are bottlenecked by the actual code-writin. I have not been in a such a position since... I dont even know. Maybe In my 20s, 15 or so years ago? Even if AI wrote my code 100x faster it would not appreciably change my working days. If it could test and verify things though... ideally physically since Im in embedded and pulling SD-cards etc is a thing.

Yeah I’m in the same boat with it. I do keep trying, but so far it has been far from earth-shattering.

I’d love it if I could get it to write decent unit tests given a basic description of what I’m testing but I at least cannot get it to output anything useful for our codebase. It’s too unaware of the broader context of the code, what objects need to be instantiated from some other internal library and passed in, etc. It can do a decent job if all I have is a totally isolated function that doesn’t touch the rest of the codebase or use any domain objects, but that’s a rare enough case as to be essentially useless to me.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#269

Post by namaria »

hoseja wrote: post #238
namaria wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About the GDP of the US and Europe over the past 80 years so a few quadrillion dollars.

That's not direct return of VC-invested cash that people are refusing to see past in here.

Doesn't matter. The Manhattan project was a breakthrough in fundamental science that changed the world. Current generative AI are a solid degree improvement on previous technology that is not remotely as big a leap as the amount of money poured into it assumes it to be.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#270

Post by surgical_fire »

siva7 wrote: post #244
surgical_fire wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use LLMs in coding. There are Junior Devs in my team. If you think LLMs operate at "junior dev" capacity you either don't work with junior devs and is just bullshitting your way around here, or you just pick pretty awful junior devs. LLMs are alright. An okay productivity tool, although its inconsistencies many times nullify productivity gains - By design they often spit out wrong results that look and sound very p…

>> If you think LLMs operate at "junior dev" capacity you either don't work with junior devs and is just bullshitting your way around here, or you just pick pretty awful junior devs. I’ve hired lots of junior devs, some of them very capable. I’ve been in this industry for more than 15 years. LLMs operate at junior dev capacity, that’s pretty clear to me at this moment.

I sincerely doubt both your experience and your ability to hire decent devs.
Post reply on HN