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Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

blog.jakesaunders.dev

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Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#301

Post by delecti »

MrLeap wrote: post #37

I'm old enough to remember being fatigued with so many people talking about making "apps". Programs that run on a phone. Before that everyone was excited about blogging. Web 2.0 ugh. Before that we were excited about the wheel and the creation of fire. All capital drained into those ephemeral fancies. The cycles cycle on.

Yep, the hype will die, and some of the substance will remain. I mean, we're currently commenting on Web2.0 about a blog post. Both stopped being the next big thing, and are now just some things we use. Relevant anecdote: I most recently worked on the apps (ding) for a car company (double-ding, fire and wheels).

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#302

Post by Rapzid »

keybored wrote: post #286
_doctor_love wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how the truly skilled will finally have their time to shine. That's not what I said. I said that those who are already shining, are now shining even brighter. Give a great craftsman a new tool and he will find a way to apply it. If it is valueless, he will throw it away. For what it's worth, your comment is also an HN trope, the disaffected low-effort armchair keyboard warrior.

Expressing a negative sentiment is a trope now?

Keybored is a trending vibe, yeah.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#303

Post by calvinmorrison »

_doctor_love wrote: post #257
djeastm wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any thoughts on what the next generation of software devs is going to look like without as much manual experience?

Honestly, I think it will look pretty much like this one. There’s a lot of manual experience that the current generation doesn’t have. For example, I haven’t racked and cabled a server in over 15 years. That used to be a valuable skill. I also used to know how to operate Cisco switches and routers (on the original IOS!). I haven't thought about CIDR and the difference between a /24 and a /30 since the year 2008. A cl…

> So some skills fade and others rise. And also, software has moved in predictable cycles for many decades at this point. We are still a very young field but we do have some history at this point.

And there'll be a split too... like there's a giant divide between those mechanics who used to work on carburetors and the new gen with microcontrollers, injection systems, etc. People who think cars are 'too complicated' aren't wrong, but for someone who grew up in the injected era, i vastly prefer debugging issues over the canbus rather than snaking my ass around a hot exhaust to check something.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#304

Post by heavyset_go »

scorpioxy wrote: post #287
cyanydeez wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that scary though: A bunch of people are going to be forced to use a tool that keeps them ignorant and they absolutely won't know if it's doing correct things, to the point that as you retire, the next crop is going to be much less involved in knowing whats going on. It's what happened with the internet and computer usage. As Apple made it easier to get online with zero computer knowledge, suddenly we're electi…

To me, it is very scary. I know people who have sort of "outsourced" their critical thinking to chatgpt. So to me it's extra scary when I see it outside technical circles. They'll just believe whatever that generation of LLM tells them because it is doing it so confidentially and never question or check the information. Maybe I'm naive but I thought easier access to knowledge was supposed to make us more intelligent,…

> Maybe I'm naive but I thought easier access to knowledge was supposed to make us more intelligent, not less.

Turns out Lowtax was right and ahead of his time

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#305

Post by bluefirebrand »

amelius wrote: post #160
lpcvoid wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is one of the causes that climate change is accelerating, which is another in a long list of reasons to hate it.

> AI is one of the causes that climate change is accelerating, which is another in a long list of reasons to hate it. If you want to point at causes of climate change, look no further than adtech. It's the driving force behind our overconsumption. And it has perhaps an even longer list of reasons to hate it.

AI and Adtech are the same damn industry

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#306

Post by solenoid0937 »

pesus wrote: post #277
overgard wrote: post #89

I'm like 99% convinced that most of the AI conversation upvotes at this point is astroturfing. I just don't see the correlation with the sentiment I get from talking to people in the real world (mostly negative AI sentiment) vs what I see here

I'm convinced that the majority of people hyping up AI don't actually interact with many people in real life, let alone people that aren't software engineers.

To those of us on the cutting edge, the opinion of the average person when it comes to these things is totally irrelevant. I see the benefit and possibilities with my own eyes, I don't need the confirmation or denial of the average person.

All that said, I've already set up a few of my non tech close friends with Cowork and they are huge fans of it now. It's somewhat shocking how much menial repetitive work the average white collar job entails.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#307

Post by imiric »

bengale wrote: post #164
_doctor_love wrote: post #153

This might sound like snark, but I truly don’t mean it that way. I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have to really understand software development. All the people I work with who are getting the most value out of using AI to deliver software are people who are already very high-skilled engineers, and the more years of real experienc…

Spot on take. The people I’ve noticed that say things like “it’s not useful” are the ones who are doing so little they can’t see the value. This isn’t to say there’s not hype. Just that if you’re not seeing big productivity gains you need to make sure you really are an outlier and not just surplus to requirements.

I rarely come across people who flat out say "it's not useful". They exist, but IME they're the minority.

Rather, I hear a lot of nuanced opinions of how the tech is useful in some scenarios, but that the net benefit is not clear. I.e. the tech has many drawbacks that make it require a lot of effort to extract actual value from. This is an opinion I personally share.

In most cases, those "big productivity gains" are vastly blown out of proportion. In the context of software development specifically, sure, you can now generate thousands of lines of code in an instant, but writing code was never the bottleneck. It was always the effort to carefully design and implement correct solutions to real-world problems. These new tools can approximate this to an extent, when given relevant context and expert guidance, but the output is always unreliable, and very difficult to verify.

So anyone who claims "big productivity gains" is likely not bothering to verify the output, which in most cases will eventually come back to haunt them and/or anyone who depends on their work. And this should concern everyone.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#308

Post by jakelsaunders94 »

Garlef wrote: post #261
jakelsaunders94 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great saying, thank you for sharing it. Out of curiosity, do you have any links to intersting AI articles you've read recently? Maybe I'll change my mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWzLPn164w0 I don't like the hype language applied by the channel host one bit - and so this is not something where I expect someone tired of the hype to be swayed - but I think his perspective is sometimes interesting (if you filter through the BS): He seems to get that the real challenge is not LLM quality but organisational integration: Tooling, harnesses, data access, etc, etc. And…

Thank you for the rec and review, I’ll take a look!

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#309

Post by thethirdone »

graypegg wrote: post #218
thethirdone wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare that to ~30% of all energy use for transportation. So approximately 40%*4% = 1.6% vs 30%. I find your correction to be more wrong that the initial statement. > And most of that new capacity will be natural gas. That increase would basically whipe out the reduction in CO2 emissions the USA has had since 2018. Emissions in 2018 were ~5250M metric ton and in 2024 it was 4750M. That is a reduction of 10% total em…

> Compare that to ~30% of all energy use for transportation Transportation, especially ALL transportation, does a LOT. You're looking for ROI not the absolute values. I think it's undeniable that the positive economic effect of every car, truck, train, and plane is unfathomably huge. That's trains moving minerals, planes moving people, trucks transporting goods, and hundreds of combinations thereof, all interconnecte…

> Also, I'm not sure about your math. 4% would be 4% of the whole like in a pie chart, not 4% of the remainder after removing one slice. 4% AI, 30% transportation, 66% other. I don't know where that 40% is from.

40% is for energy use in the US in the form of electricity. It was a rough number that I pulled from my memory. It is roughly right though. Check https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/

AI is not currently 4% of the energy market of the US. Only the grid. I should have been more clear about the ALL ENERGY vs GRID distinction.

> I think it might be more emissions-efficient at generating value than AI by a factor exceeding the 7.5x energy use. Moving rocks from (place with rocks) to (place that needs rocks) continues to be just an insanely good thing for humanity.

I really made no statement on the value of doing things. Transportation is obviously very valuable. I just wanted a more fact based conversation.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#310

Post by SpaceNoodled »

imiric wrote: post #307
bengale wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on take. The people I’ve noticed that say things like “it’s not useful” are the ones who are doing so little they can’t see the value. This isn’t to say there’s not hype. Just that if you’re not seeing big productivity gains you need to make sure you really are an outlier and not just surplus to requirements.

I rarely come across people who flat out say "it's not useful". They exist, but IME they're the minority. Rather, I hear a lot of nuanced opinions of how the tech is useful in some scenarios, but that the net benefit is not clear. I.e. the tech has many drawbacks that make it require a lot of effort to extract actual value from. This is an opinion I personally share. In most cases, those "big productivity gains" are…

That's only because we're trying to not be too condescending.
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