The problem with AI is that the media and the tech hype machine wants everyone to believe that it is more than a glorified randomized text generator. Yes, for many problems this is just what you need, but not to create reliable software. Somehow, they want everyone to go into a state of disbelief and agree that it is a superior intelligence or at least the clear sign of something of this sorts, and that we should stop everything we're doing right now to give more money and attention to this endeavor.
Everyone in Seattle hates AI
341–350 of 1001 posts
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#342Earlier 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…
> that kind of shallow dismissal indicates a closed mind, or perhaps a fear-based reaction
Or, and stay with me on this, it’s a reaction to the actual experience they had.
I’ve experimented with AI a bunch. When I’m doing something utterly formulaic it delivers (straightforward CRUD type stuff, or making a web page to display some data). But when I try to use it with the core parts of my job that actually require my specialist knowledge they fall apart. I spend more time correcting them than if I just write it myself.
Maybe you haven’t had that experience with work you do. But I have, and others have. So please don’t dismiss our reaction as “fear based” or whatever.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's a dichotomy in the software world between real products (which have customers and use cases and make money by giving people things they need) and hype product I think there is a broader dichotomy between the people-persuation-plane, and the real-world-facts plane. In the people-persuation plane, it is all about convincing someone of something, and hype plays here, and marketing, religion and political persu…
>a broader dichotomy between the people-persuation-plane, and the real-world-facts plane This right here is the real thing which AI is deployed to upset. The Enlightenment values which brought us the Industrial Revolution imply that the disparity between the people-persuasion-plane and the real-world-facts-plane should naturally decrease . The implicit expectation here is that as civilization as a whole learns more a…
This sounds a lot like the Marxist concept of alienation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#344Seattle sounds kinda nice now. AI fatigue is real. I just had to swap eye doctors because they changed their medical records to some AI powered bullshit and wanted me to re-enter all my info into the new system in order to check-in for my appointment. A website that when I looked at their EULA page redirected to an empty page, no clear mention of HIPAA anywhere on the website's other pages. The eye doctor seemed confused why I wanted to stop using them after ten years as a patient even after I pointed out the flaws. It's madness.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#345Very new ex-MSFT here. I couldn’t relate more with your friend. That’s exactly what happened. I left Microsoft about 5 weeks ago and it’s been really hard to detox from that culture. AI pushed down everywhere. Sometimes shitty-AI that needed to be proved at all cost because it should live up to the hype. I was in one of such AI-orgs and even there several teams felt the pressure from SLT and a culture drift to a dysf…
Hey man- hang in there.
FWIW: I realized this year that there are whole cohorts of management people who have absolutely zero relationship with the words that they speak. Literal tabula rasas who convert their thoughts to new words with no attachment to past statements/goals.
Put another way: Liars exist and operate all around you in the top tier of the FAANGS rn.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you rather consume a bowl of soup with a fly in it, or a 50 gallon drum with 1,000 flies in it? In which scenario are you more likely to fish out all the flies before you eat one?
Easier to skim 1000 flies from a single drum than 100 flies from 100 bowls of soup.
Alas, the flies are not floating on the surface. They are deeply mixed in, almost as if the machine that generated the soup wanted desperately to appear to be doing an excellent job making fly-free soup.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
My friends at Google are some of the most negative about the potential of AI to improve software development. I was always surprised by this and assumed internally at Google would be one of the first places to adopt these.
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.
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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#348As a Seattle SWE, I'd say most of my coworkers do hate all the time-wasting AI stuff being shoved down our throats. There are a few evangelical AI boosters I do work with, but I keep catching mistakes in their code that they didn't used to make. Large suites of elegant looking unit tests, but the unit tests include large amounts of code duplicating functionality of the test framework for no reason, and I've even seen…
> and I've even seen unit tests > that mock the actual function > under test. Yup. Ai is so fickle it’ll do anything to accomplish the task. But ai is just a tool it’s all about what you allow it to do. Can’t blame ai really.
If a tool makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot, then it's not a good tool. See C++.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#349Earlier 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…
> 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. "Engineers don't try" doesn’t refer to trying out AI in the article. It refers to trying to do something constructive and useful outside the usual corporate churn, but having given up on that because management is single-mindedly focused on AI. One way to s…
“Lost all ambition for anything else” is a funny way for the article to frame “hate being forced to run on the hampster wheel on ai, because an exec with the power to fire everyone is foaming at the mouth about ai and seemingly needs everyone to use it”
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
Howdy! I personally don't really understand the "point" the article is trying to make. I mostly agree with your sentiment that AI can be useful. I too have seen a massive increase in productivity in my hobbies, thanks to LLMs. As to the point of the article, is it just to say "People shouldn't hate LLMs"? My takeaway was more "This person's future isn't threatened directly so they just aren't understanding why people…
I guess in conclusion I'm saying that it's hard to build in Seattle, and that's really unfortunate.
I don't follow why it's hard to build in Seattle. Do you mean before this "AI summer" they struggled, or that with AI they have become too slow because they won't adopt it?