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Not everyone is using AI for everything

gabrielweinberg.com

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Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#311

Post by csomar »

zerobees wrote: post #308
hypfer wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's tough to answer because you want to hedge for both an AI enthused employer and an AI hesitant employer with limited information about who they are and how they personally use these products. Have you considered just answering truthfully? Would you even want to work somewhere where you need to play a role and where they flip out when you say the wrong word you should've correctly guessed through mind reading? T…

> Have you considered just answering truthfully? ... That sounds not like a job but a toxic relationship. It's a job, not a relationship. It's best not to confuse the two. In any workplace, you will occasionally have to do things you find boring or objectionable. And if you're hoping to find a corporation that is a "perfect match", it will only hurt more when they unceremoniously fire you because the quarterly revenu…

Define objectionable? Not ethical is not illegal but maybe if you are okay with it, do it for yourself. Illegal is just dumb, you are still responsible. So at least, if you are doing, make sure you are appropriately compensated.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#312

Post by sriram_malhar »

nutjob2 wrote: post #48
sriram_malhar wrote: post #3

Anyone who does a Google search gets a satisfactory looking answer as the very first entry. I daresay most people don't go beyond that, not even the entries on the first page, let alone go to the next. I argue that this is at the level of everyone for everything.

When was the last time you used Google? The first entry (and a few after that) is always spam. Anyone who does a search and accepts the first answer just doesn't care much or is incompetent. Anyone with any critical thinking whatsoever does way more than that if they want a correct answer.

Not the first result. The AI summary generated by gemini.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#313

Post by KaiShips »

vb-8448 wrote: post #132

I'm going back and forth with the llm agents. They are great on exploring, understanding and finding bugs in existing codebase. They are great for simple or one time scripts/programs. They are terrible, really terrible coders. The overengineering is so deep in their training that no matter what is your prompt, your skills or agents.md/claude.md, if you don't babysit them continuously, at some point they will just fuc…

[flagged]

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#314

Post by layer8 »

simonw wrote: post #297
layer8 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cellular phone network doesn’t require the internet to work.

It does require the phone to have battery charge.

The context was “Everyone does use the internet for everything today” and “most people don't even realize how the internet is running literally everything”. You don’t need the internet for your phone to have a battery charge.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#315

Post by sriram_malhar »

marking-time wrote: post #298
sriram_malhar wrote: post #3

Anyone who does a Google search gets a satisfactory looking answer as the very first entry. I daresay most people don't go beyond that, not even the entries on the first page, let alone go to the next. I argue that this is at the level of everyone for everything.

A "satisfactory looking answer" was what I got yesterday when I queried Google about a Pyodide question. It produced some code in html format that was supposed to work, but failed on execution. The AI generated result was incorrect and it was only 30ish lines of code that was supposed to print "hello world" to the console.

You still used AI, even if the results weren't correct.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#316

Post by saltcured »

taybin wrote: post #214
quacked wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Typing it is a complete waste of time unless getting up close and personal with it will result in some kind of useful and actionable improvement in you or your understanding. I believe this is the general belief about basically every human skill, that if you stop doing the technical fundamentals you get worse at understanding the activity. The question is whether coding is like sailing a square-rigged wooden ship,…

The sci-fi novel A Fire in the Deep starts with describing a Software Archeologist, who digs through millennia of strata of layers of indirection and I think we could end up needing that one day.

Do they end up determining that every weird piece of code they find must have been used for religious or ritualistic purposes?

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#317

Post by JCTheDenthog »

dukeyukey wrote: post #60
JCTheDenthog wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just write it yourself?

If you already know what the inputs/outputs are, why should you spend days or weeks of your life typing it out rather than giving it in a well-specified and tested form to an LLM to get it done a hundred times faster?

>rather than giving it in a well-specified and tested form

So, code?

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#318

Post by satisfice »

pesus wrote: post #209
reg_dunlop wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible to work for an employer, and not have to compromise your values and or professional integrity. The attitude suggested by your response suggests you haven't lived that reality yet. Either way, I'd rather be rejected by an employer for speaking my truth, than lie to be somewhere I'd rather not be.

This a very condescending and privileged comment. The job market is much different when you're just starting out, and it's especially brutal these days for new grads.

Maybe it’s condescending, but it’s valid. I have made sacrifices throughout my career to maintain maximum integrity, and the least I can do is be proud of it, since I don’t have riches or possessions to be proud of.

Yeah I rage quit my job 27 years ago and have been a struggling honest consultant ever since. Clients who want actual solutions to their problems come to me. Does that sound arrogant? Well I also have no savings and don’t own a house.

I don’t regret most of my choices, but I am aware that if somebody paid me enough money I would walk away from my principles. It would have to be a LOT of money.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#319

Post by gloosx »

whehhshs wrote: post #73
JCTheDenthog wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just write it yourself?

Because typing “code” takes time and significant amounts of it. We are slowly waking up to the fact, which was always true, that “coding” is just a fanciful preparatory task in order to appease the spirits properly so that we may invoke the spirit of what we are actually after: a live, running process that does useful things. Code is completely useless when separated from that fact. Typing it is a complete waste of t…

This is such a delusional take it's borderline trolling. Code is an expression tool to precisely describe a process that does useful thing. Typing prompts is not too different from writing some very vague code, which is arguably a waste of time by itself.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#320

Post by xboxnolifes »

xpct wrote: post #143
acc_297 wrote: post #72

On the post-grad job hunt right now - I note that most employers will ask in a technical interview or whiteboard interview "how are you using LLMs?" It's tough to answer because you want to hedge for both an AI enthused employer and an AI hesitant employer with limited information about who they are and how they personally use these products. I've been responding with a sort of long winded answer about how 'there is…

I understand the pressure to get employed from your perspective, but differences in opinion should be voiced out and typically aren't the thing leading to rejection from the company. It's common that engineering leads seek out people with different backgrounds and views to work on the same team. If anything, answering truthfully will make you stand out from others who've responded in a generic, heavily hedged way.

4 years into job hunting. Answering truthfully does not work. Nobody likes the truth, and every bit of advise i get from anyone is to lie (though, some of them use euphemisms to avoid saying "lie").
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