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Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?
341–350 of 570 posts
Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?
#342This is bad in tech. But at least we are (relatively) well equipped to deal with it. My partner teaches at a small college. These people are absolutely lost , with administration totally sold on the idea that "AI is the future" while lacking any kind of coherent theory about how to apply it to pedagogy. Administrators are typically uncritically buying into the hype, professors are a mix of compliant and (understandab…
This is really interesting. I've been out of education for a long time, but I was wondering how they were dealing with the advent of AI. Are exams still a thing? Do people do coursework now that you can spew out competent sounding stuff in seconds?
I teach CS at a university in Spain. Most people here are in denial. It is obvious to me that we need to go back to grading based on in-person exams, but in our last university reform (which tried to copy the US/UK in many aspects) there was so much political posturing and indoctrination about exams being evil and coursework having to take the fore that now most people just can't admit the truth before their own eyes. And for those of us that do admit it, we have a limited range of maneuver because grading coursework is often a requirement that emanates from above and we can't fundamentally change it.
So in most courses nothing has changed in the way we grade. Suddenly coursework grades have gone up sharply. Anyone with working neurons know why, but in the best case, nothing of consequence is done. In the worst case (fortunately uncommon), there are people trusting snake oil detectors and probably unfairly failing some students. Oh, and I forgot: there are also some people who are increasing the difficulty of the coursework in line with LLMs. Which I guess more or less makes sense... Except that if a student wants to learn without using them, then they suddenly will find assignments to be out of their league.
So yeah, it's a mess.
Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
You do realize though that using Claude Desktop to "search" through confluence is like paying a world class architect on the hour just to give you some tips on how to layout your small loft to maximize sunlight. This is such a perfect example of the mania behind this rollout. There's no way you can make the financials work here compared to JetBrains spending the same millions spent on AI infrastructure and instead bu…
And what is using Confluence in the first place? Your MacBook Pro is faster than a supercomputer from 20 years ago. As we make compute cheaper, we find ways to use it that are less efficient in an absolute sense but more efficient for the end user. A graphical docs portal like Confluence is a hell of a lot easier to use than EMacs and SSH to edit plain text files on an 80 character terminal. But it uses thousands of…
I'm confused by your analogy. A wiki run server is extremely efficient to run, and can be hosted from a tiny little raspberry pie. A search engine can be optimized to provide results near O(1). You can even pull up and read results on a very old computer. All of the concerns around cost and resource efficiency can be addressed as all of this is a solved problem.
Even with an LLM agent getting cheaper to run in the future, it's still fundamentally non-deterministic so the ongoing cost for a single exploration query run can never get anywhere near as cheap as running a wiki with a proper search engine.
Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?
#344Gosh how i miss the old HN Days… where one would actually code, read docs, and develop stuff and feel happy about it. Not write a prompt and watch a chatbox do all the work in a matter of seconds. It’s like we’re losing the meaning of building something… dk how to explain it more. But yeah, it’s tech! Nothing stays the same
The old HN was full of people feeling smug about their intellectual capabilities.
The new HN is full of people filled with anxiety about being replaced by an advanced calculator.
To an outsider, it could almost be funny if it wasn't so sad.
Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But I also know that by using it I’m contributing to making my job redundant one day. I don't see how this is the case if you're anything more than a junior engineer... it unlocks so many possibilities. You can do so much more now. We are more limited by our ideas at this point than anything else. Why is the reaction of so many people, once their menial work gets automated, "oh no, my menial work is automated." Why…
>Why is the reaction of so many people, once their menial work gets automated, "oh no, my menial work is automated." Why is it not "sweet, now I can do bigger/better/more ambitious things?" because i have rent to pay? old age to prepare for? why is it so hard to understand most people are not rich, that the cost of living is high, and that most people are VERY afraid their jobs will be automated away? why is so hard…
Because there is always work to do. It is true that demand will drop for those that don't take initiative and aren't sure what to do now that AI can do their repetitive tasks. However, demand will surge for those that can think critically about how to utilize AI to empower businesses.
"Software engineer" as a profession is rapidly getting automated at my company, and yet our SWEs are delivering more value than ever before. The layer of abstraction has changed, that is all.
> what world, what reality are you guys living in?!
One that has seen immense benefits from the Industrial Revolution and previous waves of automation.
Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?
#346Like many endeavors, the most vocal in favor or against aren't really doing much. The people actually succeeding with AI probably aren't interested in giving away their secrets.
AI is especially sensitive to this. Unlike coding, where giving away the secret sauce also makes you look smart, divulging AI secrets only demystifies you -- revealing the shriveling man behind the Wizards curtain.
So anyone boasting about AI is likely not doing anything useful with it.
Similar to finance tips, btw.
Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?
#347This 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…
This is really not true. There are stories of people who had no background in software engineering who now write entire applications using AI. And I have personally seen this happen.
Before AI, there were also stories of people who had no background in software engineering who wrote entire applications using their fingers. This was called "learning to be a software engineer".
I don't mean to snipe at AI, because it really does seem to have set more people on the path of learning, but I was writing VB5 apps when I was 14 by copying poorly understood bits and pieces from books. Now people are doing basically the same but with less typing and everyone thinks it's a revolution.
Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. As annoying as all sorts of 'safety features' are, the sheer amount of effort that goes into further restricting that on the corporate wrapper side side makes llm nigh unusable. How can those kids even begin to get the idea of what it can do, when it seems like its severely locked down.
Could you provide an example of such a thing that is prevented?
Sure. In the instance I am aware of, SQL ( and xml and few others )files are explicitly verbotten, but you can upload them as text and reference them that way; references to personal information like DOB immediately stops the inference with no clear error as to why, but referencing the same info any other way allows it go on.
It is all small things, but none of those small things are captured anywhere so whoever is on the other end has to 'discover' through trial and error.
Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But I also know that by using it I’m contributing to making my job redundant one day. I don't see how this is the case if you're anything more than a junior engineer... it unlocks so many possibilities. You can do so much more now. We are more limited by our ideas at this point than anything else. Why is the reaction of so many people, once their menial work gets automated, "oh no, my menial work is automated." Why…
> I don't see how this is the case if you're anything more than a junior engineer... it unlocks so many possibilities. I really don't understand this way of thinking. Don't you think that AI could replace senior engineers? Sure, companies will be able to do bigger / better / more ambitious stuff - but without any software engineers. > Why is it BS? I'm shocked that anyone with a love and passion for technology can fe…
So far AI doesn't seem even close to replacing senior engieeners. Hell, it can't even replace junior engieeners entirely.
I use AI agents every day at work and I'm happy with that, but it took over two years and billions of dollars in investment to deliver anything useful (Claude Code et al). The current models are amazing, but they still randomly make mistakes that even a junior wouldn't make.
There's another paradigm shift to be made certainly, because currently it feels like we scaled up a bug brain to spit out code. It works great for some problems, but it's not what software developers usually do at work.
Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?
#350No, well, I still enjoy the articles. The thing that always surprises me is the negativity in comment threads. I'm genuinely quite excited about AI based development. Yesterday I was playing around with developing a marketing plan for a market gap where we could leverage our product and finding what features in our product would need changing/adding to improve our offering. Quite interesting results!
I think in most places on the internet the negative comments are the ones that will win out. Same for AI I suppose. I tried not to bemoan the whole concept here, just the amount of 'airtime' it gets. Sort of like when something happens in the news (lately it's been the Epstein files for me), and you wish you could see a more balanced picture of world events.
Surround yourself with positive people. Reddit's take for an event I was at made it sound like it went terribly, but I was there and had fun.