Two kinds of AI users are emerging • Hacker News Board

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#281

Post by riskable » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 3:37 PM UTC

tharkun__ wrote: post #38

majormajor wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the dirty secrets of a lot of these "code adjacent" areas is that they have very little testing. If a data science team modeled something incorrectly in their simulation, who's gonna catch it? Usually nobody. At least not until it's too late. Will you say "this doesn't look plausible" about the output? Or maybe you'll be too worried about getting chided for "not being data driven" enough. If an exec tells an i…

This is a pet peeve of mine at work. Any and I mean any statistic someone throws at me I will try and dig in. And if I'm able to, I will usually find that something is very wrong somewhere. As in, the underlying data is usually just wrong, invalidating the whole thing or the data is reasonably sound but the person doing the analysis is making incorrect assumptions about parts of the data and then drawing incorrect co…

> Any and I mean any statistic someone throws at me I will try and dig in.

I bet you do this only 75% of the time.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#282

Post by riskable » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 3:40 PM UTC

simmerup wrote: post #2

Terrifying that people are creating financial models with AI when they don’t have the skills to verify the model does what they expect

I work for a huge bank: The actual terrifying thing is that these financial models semi-technical management are creating in Excel are actually relied upon in the first place.

If you convert bullshit from Excel to Python it's still bullshit. There's a reason why Claude can one-shot it and no one questions the result :D

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#283

Post by gipp » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 3:42 PM UTC

senordevnyc wrote: post #247

benjijay wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a data science team modeled something incorrectly in their simulation, who's gonna catch it? Usually nobody. At least not until it's too late. Will you say "this doesn't look plausible" about the output? I recently watched a demo from a data science guy about the impending proliferation of AI in just about all related fields, his position was highly sceptical but with a "let's make the most of it while we can" T…

Like every anecdote out there where an LLM makes a basic mistake, this one is worthless without knowing the model and prompt.

If choosing the "wrong" model, or not wording your prompt in just the right way, is sufficient to not just degrade your output but make it actively misleading and worse than useless, then what does that say about the narrative that all this sort of work is about to be replaced?

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#284

Post by pizzafeelsright » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 3:45 PM UTC

nebula8804 wrote: post #20

simmerup wrote: post #2

Terrifying that people are creating financial models with AI when they don’t have the skills to verify the model does what they expect

All we need is one major crash caused by AI to scare the capital owners. Then maybe us white collar workers can breath a bit for at least another few more years(maybe a decade+).

Most of the large outages at Meta in the past 10 years were related to early AI automation.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#285

Post by pizzafeelsright » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 3:47 PM UTC

simmerup wrote: post #2

Terrifying that people are creating financial models with AI when they don’t have the skills to verify the model does what they expect

Someone recently had AI create a trading bot and it returns 131% on every transaction over a 30 day period - do you really think they care about code quality or ability to verify the math?

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#286

Post by riskable » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 3:48 PM UTC

fny wrote: post #267

Software engineers don't understand how user hostile all these AI gizmos are. Terminals are scary. AI running local code is scary. Random Github software is scary. And in my experience, normies are far more security paranoid than developers when it comes to AI.

Normies have a much more realistic take on AI than technical people or semi-technical "power users":

    * They LOVE image-generating AI and AI that messes with their own photos/videos.
    * They will ask ChatGPT, Gemini, etc and just believe the result.
    * They will ask Copilot to help them make a formula in Excel and be happy to be done.

The common theme here is they don't care. To them, AI is just a neat thing. It's not a huge difference in their lives. They don't think about the environmental impact much unless someone tells them it's bad, via a high-quality video stream that itself was vastly worse for the environment than any AI conversation or image generation ever could be.

They will play a game 100% made by AI because their friend said it was fun. They don't care that some AAA publisher lost a sale on their "human made for sure, just trust us :nod:" identical game because the bored person was able to pull of something good enough with little effort (and better design decisions).

They also don't care if some article or book or whatever was written partially or entirely by AI as long as it's good. The AI part just isn't important to them. Not even a little bit!

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#287

Post by riskable » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 3:56 PM UTC

crystal_revenge wrote: post #133

One the most reliable BS detectors I've found is when you have to try to convince other people of your edge . If you have found a model that accurately predicts the stock market, you don't write a blog post about how brilliant you are, you keep it quiet and hope no one finds out while you rake in profits. I still can't figure out quite what motivates these "AI evangelist" types (unlike crypto evangelists who clearly…

> devs willing to relocate to SF

It baffled me 10 years ago why a company would be willing to pay SF salaries for people who can work from anywhere and it still holds true to this day.

Unless your engineer needs to literally be next to the hardware AND "the hardware" isn't something that can be shipped to/run at their home, why TF would you want to pay Silicon Valley salaries for engineers?

I know a guy that does electrical engineering work that works from home. He makes medical devices! When he orders PCBs they get shipped to his house. He works on a team that has other people doing the same thing (the PCB testing person also gets the boards at home; but that guy's a consultant). For like $1000 (one time) you can setup a "home lab" for doing (plenty sufficient) electronics work. Why would you want to pay ~$100,000/year premium to hire someone local for the same thing?

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#288

Post by benjijay » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 4:07 PM UTC

senordevnyc wrote: post #247

benjijay wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a data science team modeled something incorrectly in their simulation, who's gonna catch it? Usually nobody. At least not until it's too late. Will you say "this doesn't look plausible" about the output? I recently watched a demo from a data science guy about the impending proliferation of AI in just about all related fields, his position was highly sceptical but with a "let's make the most of it while we can" T…

Like every anecdote out there where an LLM makes a basic mistake, this one is worthless without knowing the model and prompt.

I don't recall the bot he was using, it was a rushed portion of the presentation to make the point that "yes these tools exist, but be mindful of the output - they're not a magic wand"

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#289

Post by BolsunBacset » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 4:28 PM UTC

camgunz wrote: post #136

I think this article is generally insightful, but I don't think the author really knows if they one shotted the excel to python transformation or not. Maybe they elided an extensive testing phase, but otherwise big bugs could be lurking. Maybe it's not a big deal, or maybe it's a compliance model with severe financial penalties for non-compliance. I just personally don't kind these tradeoffs going implicit.

The author also said "almost" one shotted. Almost can mean a lot of things. I'm almost rich and almost handsome. But just not there...

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#290

Post by bwestergard » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

idopmstuff wrote: post #273

3D30497420 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People outsourcing thinking and entire skillset to it - they usually have very little clue in the topic, are interested only in results, and are not interested in knowing more about the topic or honing their skills in the topic And this may be fine in certain cases. I'm learning German and my listening comprehension is marginal. I took a practice test and one of the exercises was listening to 15-30 seconds of audio…

This is me, but for writing code. I own a business, and I use Claude Code to build internal tools for myself. Don't care about code quality; never seen the code. I care if the tools do the things I want them to do, and they verifiably do.

I'd love to hear about what your tools do.