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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#461

Post by almostdeadguy »

gipp wrote: post #295
CSMastermind wrote: post #223

Earlier 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.

Engineers at Google are much less likely to be doing green-field generation of large amounts of code . It's much more incremental, carefully measured changes to mature, complex software stacks, and done within the Google ecosystem, which is heavily divergent from the OSS-focused world of startups, where most training data comes from

I think it’s a fair point that google has more stakeholders with a serious investment in some flubbed AI generated code not tanking their share value, but I’m not sure the rest of it is all that different from what engineer at $SOME_STARTUP does after the first ~8monthes the company is around. Maybe some folks throwing shit at a wall to find PMF are really getting a lot out of this, but most of us are maintaining and augmenting something we don’t want to break.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#462

Post by rhetocj23 »

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.

Yes. The people who are amazed with AI were never that good at a particular subject area in the first place - I dont care who you are. You were not good enough - how do I know this? Well I know economics, corporate finance, accounting et al very deeply. Ive engaged with LLMS for years now and still they cannot get below the surface level and are not improving further than this.

Its easy to recall information, but something entirely different to do something with that information. Which is what those subject ares are all about - taking something (like a theory) and applying it in a disciplined manner given the context.

Thats not to diminish what LLMs can do. But lets get real.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#463

Post by canjobear »

buildsjets wrote: post #237
mips_avatar wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that changed my view on LLMs was solo traveling for 6 months after leaving Microsoft. There were a lot of points on the trip where I was in a lot of trouble (severe food sickness, stolen items, missed flights) where I don't know how I would have solved those problems without chatGPT helping.

This is one of the most depressing things I have ever read on Hacker News. You claim to have become so de-actualized as a human being that you cannot fulfill the most basic items of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (food, health, personal security, shelter, transportation) without the aid of an LLM.

Extremely uncharitable reading. Plausibly they were in a foreign country where they didn't speak any of the language and didn't know how anything worked. This kind of situation was never easy for anyone.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#464

Post by zubiaur »

hexator wrote: post #209
shepardrtc wrote: post #50

Ok so a few thoughts as a former Seattleite: 1. You were a therapy session for her. Her negativity was about the layoffs. 2. FAANG companies dramatically overhired for years and are using AI as an excuse for layoffs. 3. AI scene in Seattle is pretty good, but as with everywhere else was/is a victim of the AI hype. I see estimates of the hype being dead in a year. AI won't be dead, but throwing money at the whatever U…

Some people really do hate AI, it's not entirely about the layoffs. This is a well insulated bubble but you can find tons of anti-AI forums online.

Some people take find their life meaning through craft and work. When that craft is suddenly less scarce, less special, so does that craft-tied meaning.

I wonder if these feelings are what scribes and amanuenses felt when the printing press arrived.

I do enjoy programming, I like my job and take pride on it, but I actively try for it not to be the life-mean giving activity. I'm a just mercenary of my trade.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#465

Post by [deleted] »

teej wrote: post #327
munificent wrote: post #291

Earlier 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.

[deleted]

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#466

Post by klardotsh »

Klonoar wrote: post #168
palmotea wrote: post #102

> But then I realized this was bigger than one conversation. Every time I shared Wanderfugl with a Seattle engineer, I got the same reflexive, critical, negative response. This wasn't true in Bali, Tokyo, Paris, or San Francisco—people were curious, engaged, wanted to understand what I was building. But in Seattle? Instant hostility the moment they heard "AI." So what's different between Seattle and San Francisco? Do…

I live in Seattle now, and have lived in San Francisco as well. Seattle has more “normal” people and the overall rhetoric about how life “should be” is in many ways resistant to tech. There’s a lot to like about the city, but it absolutely does not have a hustle culture. I’ve honestly found it depressing coming from the East Coast. Tangent aside, my point is that Seattle has far more of a comparison ground of “you al…

Western Washington is very much a "work to live" place, and in a lot of ways there's a feedback loop to ensure it stays that way: surrounded by fellow "work to live" folks who would far rather just get our work done well and head out to the mountains, forests, and seas, the hustle bros will usually leave within a few years. I've watched it happen with quite a number of type-A folks. Exceptions for folks who make it into certain orgs in Amazon or into startup leadership, those seem to be safe places for hustlers around here.

Anyway. I think you're spot on with the "you all are building shit that doesn't make the world better, it just devalues the human" vibe. Regardless of what employers in WA may force folks to build, that's the mentality here, and AI evangelists don't make many friends... nor did blockchain evangelists, or evangelists of any of the spin-off hype trains ("Web3", NFTs, etc). I guess the "cloud" hype train stuck here, but that happened before I moved out west.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#467

Post by tptacek »

neutronicus wrote: post #130
tptacek wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not at all my experience working in local government (that is, in close contact with everybody else paying attention to local government) that non-tech people hate AI. It seems rather the opposite.

Anyone involved in government procurement loves AI, irrespective of what it even is, for the simple fact that they get to pointedly ask every single tech vendor for evidence that they have "leveraged efficiency gains from AI" in the form of a lower bid. At least, that's my wife's experience working on a contract with a state government at a big tech vendor.

Not talking about government employees, for whatever that's worth.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#468

Post by stocksinsmocks »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #328
dwaltrip wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s kind of fun watching this comment go up and down :) There’s so much evidence out there of people getting real value from the tools. Some questions you can ask yourself are “why doesn’t it work for me?” and “what can I do differently?”. Be curious, not dogmatic. Ignore the hype, find people doing real work.

They're good questions! The problem is that I've tried to talk to the people who are getting real value from it, and often the answer ends up being that the value is not as real as they think. One guy gave an excited presentation about how AI let him write 7k LOC per day, expounded for an entire session about how the rest of us should follow in his shoes, and then clarified only in Q&A that reviewers couldn't keep up…

Most enterprise software I use has serious defects. Professional CAD software for infrastructure is awful. Many are just incremental improvements piled upon software from the 1990s. Bugs last for decades because nobody can understand how the program works so they just work on one more little VBA plugin at a time. Meanwhile, the capabilities of these programs have fallen completely behind game studios with no budget and no business plan. Where are the results of this human excellence and code quality process? There are 10s of thousands of new CVEs every year from code hand crafted by artisans on their very own MacBooks. How? Perhaps there is the tiny possibility that maybe code quality is mostly an aesthetic judgment that nobody can really define, and just maybe this effort is mostly spent on vague concepts like maintainability or preferential decisions instead of the basics: does it meet the specification? Is the performance getting better or worse?

This is the game changer for me: I don’t have to evaluate tens or hundreds of market options that fit my problem. I tell the machine to solve it, and if it works, then I’m happy. If it doesn’t I throw it away. All in a few minutes and for a few cents. Code is going the way of the disposable diaper, and, if you ever washed a cloth diaper you will know, that’s a good thing.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#469

Post by pier25 »

shepardrtc wrote: post #50

Ok so a few thoughts as a former Seattleite: 1. You were a therapy session for her. Her negativity was about the layoffs. 2. FAANG companies dramatically overhired for years and are using AI as an excuse for layoffs. 3. AI scene in Seattle is pretty good, but as with everywhere else was/is a victim of the AI hype. I see estimates of the hype being dead in a year. AI won't be dead, but throwing money at the whatever U…

It’s not only the hype though.

What about the complete lack of morality some (most?) AI companies exhibit?

What about the consequences in the environment?

What about the enshitification of products?

What about the usage of water and energy?

Etc.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#470

Post by erentz »

mips_avatar wrote: post #286
buildsjets wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the most depressing things I have ever read on Hacker News. You claim to have become so de-actualized as a human being that you cannot fulfill the most basic items of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (food, health, personal security, shelter, transportation) without the aid of an LLM.

IDK I got really sick in a foreign country, I wasn't sure how to get to the hospital and I was alone in a hotel room. I don't really know how using chatgpt to help me isn't actualizing.

We used to have Google search and Google maps which solved this problem of finding information about symptoms and finding medical centers near you. LLM doesn’t make anything better it just confidently asserts things about medicine that may be wrong and always need to be verified with the real sources anyway.
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