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Two kinds of AI users are emerging

martinalderson.com

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Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#311

Post by Mentlo »

leptons wrote: post #129
fdsf2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing but ego frankly. Apple had no problem settling for a small market share back in the day... look where they are now. It didnt come from make-believe and fantasy scenarios of the future based on an unpredictable technology.

>look where they are now. Still with a small market share. They only figured out how to extort the maximum amount of money from a smaller user base, and app developers, really anyone they can.

I guess a quarter of the smartphone market (leader), half of the tablet market (leader) and a tenth of the global pc market (2nd place) / 6th of the usa/europe market (2nd place) being a small market share is a take.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#312

Post by stego-tech »

vages wrote: post #131
stego-tech wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enterprise IT dinosaur here, seconding this perspective and the author’s. When I needed to bash out a quick Hashicorp Packer buildfile without prior experience beyond a bit of Vault and Terraform, local AI was a godsend at getting me 80% of the way there in seconds. I could read it, edit it, test it, and move much faster than Packer’s own thin “getting started” guide offered. The net result was zero prior knowledge t…

Which local AI do you use? I am local-curious, but don’t know which models to try, as people mention them by model name much less than their cloud counterparts.

I'm frequently rotating and experimenting specifically because I don't want to be dependent upon a single model when everything changes week-to-week; focusing on foundations, not processes. Right now, I've got a Ministral 3 14B reasoning model and Qwen3 8B model on my Macbook Pro; I think my RTX 3090 rig uses a slightly larger parameter/less quantized Ministral model by default, and juggles old Gemini/OpenAI "open weights" models as they're released.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#313

Post by h4kunamata »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #142

I'd argue 2 types of users are * People using it as a tool, aware of its limitations and treating it basically as intern/boring task executor (whether its some code boilerplate, or pooping out/shortening some corporate email), or as tool to give themselves summary of topic they can then bite into deeper. * People outsourcing thinking and entire skillset to it - they usually have very little clue in the topic, are int…

This, I have a friend using AI bots to do the whole "brain processing", he is just pressing buttons now. Even some smart cooking pan they bought (couple), uses an app with AI in it.

I can see the day that all of these folks completing replacing their thinking skill with AI, unable to find job because they can no longer troubleshoot anything without AI.

I use AI as replacement for search engine, I spent 3 nights using ChatGPT to assist me in deploying a Proxmox LXC container running 4 network services and the whole traffic is routed to Proton VPN via WireGuard. If the VPN goes down, the whole container network stops without using my real IP. Everything was done via Ansible which I use to manage my homelad, and was able to identify mistakes and fix them myself. Dude, I have learned a ton with LXC and sort of moving away from VMs.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#314

Post by riscii68 »

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

Yep. And I think many are too focused on just the pure ability to build models now, when in reality a model is at its core a set of assumptions. Using models you don't understand, didn't build, and barely reviewed amplifies the magnitude of any assumption error, imo.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#316

Post by bsoles »

ForHackernews wrote: post #275
eitally wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically (I'm 48), professionals have cared about their jobs, generally speaking, and often do make serious attempts to logically derive sociological benefits from their personal efforts. There's been a seismic shift over the past 5-6 years, though, and this sense of care has massively eroded.

Software developers have never been professionals. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, chartered engineers are professionals. They have autonomy and obligations to a professional code of ethics that supersedes their responsibility to their employers. Devs are hired goons at worst and skilled craftspeople at best, but never professionals.

There are, proportionally, more lawyers than software engineers in prison I would claim. Code of ethics doesn't really mean much.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#317

Post by leptons »

Mentlo wrote: post #311
leptons wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>look where they are now. Still with a small market share. They only figured out how to extort the maximum amount of money from a smaller user base, and app developers, really anyone they can.

I guess a quarter of the smartphone market (leader), half of the tablet market (leader) and a tenth of the global pc market (2nd place) / 6th of the usa/europe market (2nd place) being a small market share is a take.

>a quarter of the smartphone market (leader)

Android is by far the leader.

>half of the tablet market (leader)

Half does not make someone a "leader"

>a tenth of the global pc market (2nd place)

2nd place?? They're last place, by a wide margin.

>6th of the usa/europe market (2nd place)

Also last place.

I guess the reality distortion field is still alive and well.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#318

Post by storus »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #243
veunes wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this speedrun hits a wall at the context window. As long as the project fits into 200k tokens, you’re flying. The moment it outgrows that, productivity doesn’t drop by 20% - it drops to zero. You start spending hours explaining to the agent what you changed in another file that it has already forgotten. Large organizations win in the long run precisely because they rely on processes that don’t depend on the me…

This reads as if written by someone who has never used these tools before. No one ever tries to "fit" the entire project into a single context window. Successfully using coding LLMs involves context management (some of which is now done by the models themselves) so that you can isolate the issues you're currently working on, and get enough context to work effectively. Working on enormous codebases over the past two m…

What are the SOTA methods for context management assuming the agent runs with its tool calls without any break? Do you flush GPU tokens/adjust KV caches when you need to compress context by summarizing/logging some part?

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#319

Post by Gigachad »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #113
Gigachad wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar experience. I love using Gemini to set up my home server, it can debug issues and generate simple docker compose files faster than I could have done myself. But at work on the 10 year old Rails app, I find it so much easier to just write all the code myself than to work out what prompt would work and then review/modify the results.

This makes me think how AI turns SW development upside down. In traditonal development we write code which is the answer to our problems. With AI we write questions and get the answers. Neither is easy, finding the correct questions can be a lot fo work, whereas if you have some existing code you already have the answers, but you may not have the questions (= "specs") written down anywhere, at least not very well, ty…

At least in my experience the AI agents work best when you give them a description of a concrete code change like "Write a function which does this here" rather than vague product ideas like "The user wants this problem solved". But coming up with the prompts for an exact code change is often harder than writing the code.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#320

Post by hnisfullof2 »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #142

I'd argue 2 types of users are * People using it as a tool, aware of its limitations and treating it basically as intern/boring task executor (whether its some code boilerplate, or pooping out/shortening some corporate email), or as tool to give themselves summary of topic they can then bite into deeper. * People outsourcing thinking and entire skillset to it - they usually have very little clue in the topic, are int…

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