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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#331

Post by [deleted] »

basscomm wrote: post #260
ajkjk wrote: post #124

> like building an AI product made me part of the problem. It's not about their careers. It's about the injustice of the whole situation. Can you possibly perceive the injustice? That the thing they're pissed about is the injustice? You're part of the problem because you can't. That's why it's not about whether the tools are good or bad. Most of them suck, also, but occasionally they don't--but that's not the point.…

> It's not about their careers. That's the thing, though, it is about their careers. It's not just that people are annoyed that someone who spends years to decades learning their craft and then someone who put a prompt into a chatbot that spit out an app that mostly works without understanding any of the code that they 'wrote'. It's that the executives are positively giddy at the prospect that they can get rid of som…

[deleted]

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#332

Post by tomlockwood »

I don't know if anyone has been reading cover letters recently but it seems that people are prompting the LLMs with the same shit, dusting their hands and thinking "done" and what the reader then sees is the same repetitive, uncreative and instantly recognizable boilerplate.

The people prompting don't seem to realize what's coming out the other end is boilerplate dreck, and you've got to think - if you're replaceable with boilerplate dreck maybe your skills weren't all that, anyway?

The hate is justified. The hype, is not.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#333

Post by bluGill »

senordevnyc wrote: post #244
averyvery wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, "Engineers don't try" is a frustrating statement. We've all tried generative AI, and there's not that much to it — you put text in, you get text back out. Some models are better at some tasks, some tools are better at finding the right text and connecting it to the right actions, some tools provide a better wrapper around the text-generation process. Certain jobs are very easy for AI to do, others are impossibl…

I’ve been an engineer for 20 years, for myself, small companies, and big tech, and now working for my own saas company. There are many valid critiques of AI, but “there’s not much there” isn’t one of them. To me, any software engineer who tries an LLM, shrugs and says “huh, that’s interesting” and then “gets back to work” is completely failing at their actual job, which is using technology to solve problems. Maybe AI…

I use AI all the time, but the only gain they have is better spelling and grammar than me. Spelling and grammar has long been my weak point. I can write the same code they write just as fast without - typing has never been the bottleneck in writing code. The bottleneck is thinking and I still need to understand the code AI writes since it is incorrect rather often so it isn't saving any effort, other than the time to look up the middle word of some long variable name.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#334

Post by dingnuts »

venturecruelty wrote: post #304
yoyohello13 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has good engineers. Generally I've noticed the better someone is at coding the more critical they are of AI generated code. Which make sense honestly. It's easier to spot flaws the more expert you are. This doesn't mean they don't use AI gen code, just they are more careful with when an where.

Yes, because they're more likely to understand that the computer isn't this magical black box, and that just because we've made ELIZA marginally better, doesn't mean it's actually good. Anecdata, but the people I've seen be dazzled by AI the most are people with little to no programming experience. They're also the ones most likely to look on computer experts with disdain.

[dead]

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#335

Post by debesyla »

decimalenough wrote: post #253

While everybody else is ranting about AI, I'll rant about something else: trip planning apps. There have been literally thousands of attempts at this and AFAICT precisely zero have ever gotten any traction. There are two intractable problems in this space. 1) A third party app simply cannot compete with Google Maps on coverage, accuracy and being up to date. Yes, there are APIs you can use to access this, but they're…

It's just another business/service niche that is solved until the current Big Provider becomes Evil or goes under.

Similar to "made for everyone" social networks and video upload platforms.

But there are niches that are trip planning + there are no one solving the pain! For example Geocaching. I always dreamed about an easy way to plan Geocaching routes to travel and find interesting caches on the way. Currently you gotta filter them out and then eyeball the map what seems to be nearby, despite there, maybe, not being any real roads there, or the cache is probably maybe actually lost or has to be accessed at specific time of day.

So... No one wants apps that are already solved + boring.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#336

Post by ilaksh »

mips_avatar wrote: post #169
vessenes wrote: post #43

Thanks for the post - it's work to write and synthesize, and I always appreciate it! My first reaction was "replace 'AI' with the word 'Cloud'" ca 2012 at MS; what's novel here? With that in mind, I'm not sure there is anything novel about how your friend is feeling or the organizational dynamics, or in fact how large corporations go after business opportunities; on those terms, I think your friends' feelings are a l…

It does feel like without a compelling AI product Microsoft isn't super differentiated. Maybe Satya is right that scale is a differentiation, but I don't think people are as trapped in an AI ecosystem as they were in Azure.

Lol. You don't think that Microsoft has _a_ compelling AI product? The new version of 365 Copilot is objectively compelling, even if it is a work in progress. And Github Copilot is also objectively compelling.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#337

Post by thewebguyd »

mjr00 wrote: post #272
senordevnyc wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been an engineer for 20 years, for myself, small companies, and big tech, and now working for my own saas company. There are many valid critiques of AI, but “there’s not much there” isn’t one of them. To me, any software engineer who tries an LLM, shrugs and says “huh, that’s interesting” and then “gets back to work” is completely failing at their actual job, which is using technology to solve problems. Maybe AI…

> There are many valid critiques of AI, but “there’s not much there” isn’t one of them. "There's not much there" is a totally valid critique of a lot of the current AI ecosystem. How many startups are simple prompt wrappers on top of ChatGPT? How many AI features in products are just "click here to ask Rovo/Dingo/Kingo/CutesyAnthropomorphizedNameOfAI" text boxes that end up spitting out wrong information? There's cer…

> simply because the market has never really punished people for being less efficient at their jobs

In fact, it tends to be the opposite. You being more efficient just means you get "rewarded" with more work, typically without an appropriate increase in pay to match the additional work either.

Especially true in large, non-tech companies/bureaucratic enterprises where you are much better off not making waves, and being deliberately mediocre (assuming you're not a ladder climber and aren't trying to get promoted out of an IC role).

In a big team/org, your personal efficiency is irrelevant. The work can only move as fast as the slowest part of the system.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#338

Post by keeda »

As I've said before: AI mandates, like RTO mandates, are just another way to "quiet fire" people, or at least "quiet renegotiate" their employment.

That said, AI resistance is real too. We see it on this forum. It's understandable because the hype is all about replacing people, which will naturally make them defensive, whereas the narrative should be about amplifying them.

A well-intentioned AI mandate would either come with a) training and/or b) dedicated time to experiment and figuring out what works well for you. Instead what we're seeing across the industry is "You MUST use AI to do MORE with LESS while we layoff even more people and move jobs overseas."

My cynical take is, this is an intentional strategy to continue culling headcount, except overindexing on people seen as unaligned with the AI future of the company.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#339

Post by yieldcrv »

BGyss wrote: post #282
yieldcrv wrote: post #85

Unlike Seattle, in Los Angeles there are few software engineers but I would not utter AI at all here Its an infinite moving goalpost of hate, if its an actor, "creative", writer, AI is a monolithic doom, next its theoretical public policy or the lack thereof, and if they have nothing that affects them about it then it's about the energy use and environment nobody is going to hear about what your AI does, so don't men…

I was just about to post that this entire story could have been completely transposed to almost every conversation I've had in Los Angeles over the past year and a half. Looks like you beat me to it!

the only difference is that I don't have the conversation ha, I don't tell people about anything I do that's remotely close to that, rarely even mention anything in tech. I listen to enough other conversations to catch on to how it goes, very easy to get roped into an AI doomer conversation that's hard to get out of

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#340

Post by a1exyz »

There are a few clashing forces. One is the power of startups - what people love is what will prevail. It made macs and iphones grab marketshare back from "corporate" options like windows and palm pilot. Its what keeps tiktok running.

An opposing force is corporate momentum. Its unfortunately true that people are beholden to what companies create. If there are only a few phones available, you will have to pick. If there are only so many shows streaming, you'll probably end up watching the less disgusting of the options.

They are clashing. The ppl's sentiment is AI bad. But if tech keeps making it and pushing it long enough, ppl will get older, corporate initiatives will get sticky, and it will become ingrained. And once its ingrained, its gonna be here forever.

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