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Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

blog.jakesaunders.dev

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Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#461

Post by sellmesoap »

bGl2YW5j wrote: post #325
eloisant wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When C arrived, programmers wonder how software devs would look like when they won't have assembly experience. Then the same happened with languages that managed memory. And with IDE that could refactor your code in a click and autocomplete API calls. And with Stack Overflow where people copy/pasted code they didn't understand.

I reckon there's a limit to how long this abstraction can go on before not understanding underlying mechanisms will seriously hamstring you.

Well how many times have we seen the S3 bucket set to public while the customer data piles up and leaks out to space.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#462

Post by civvv »

simianwords wrote: post #458
nicbou wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My only gripe is how myopic the AI discussion on HN is. We barely talk about how it hits everyone else. In the relocation industry, it's losing translators, relocation consultants and immigration lawyers a lot of work. Their cases are also getting tougher because people are getting false information from ChatGPT and arguing with them. This problem is compounded by the lack of training data for that topic. I spent yea…

Half as good and tenth of the cost is a good replacement. I constantly make those choices myself when purchasing things.

That entirely depends on what you are buying. If you’re in need of a lawyer to keep you out of the bottom bunk, I’d happily spend a lot more for a little better.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#463

Post by nicbou »

simianwords wrote: post #458
nicbou wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My only gripe is how myopic the AI discussion on HN is. We barely talk about how it hits everyone else. In the relocation industry, it's losing translators, relocation consultants and immigration lawyers a lot of work. Their cases are also getting tougher because people are getting false information from ChatGPT and arguing with them. This problem is compounded by the lack of training data for that topic. I spent yea…

Half as good and tenth of the cost is a good replacement. I constantly make those choices myself when purchasing things.

It's fine to an extent, but it kills what happens in the other half.

You can feel it with AI-generated content and responses, in AI-generated art, customer service bots and vibe-coded software. This gradual worsening of everything won't lead to lower prices or a better experience, so it's not really a tradeoff.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#467

Post by pjmlp »

_doctor_love wrote: post #153

This 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…

I am having an identity crisis that thankfully is sorted out by being senior and close to retirement than early career days.

Since COVID I have seen teams scaled down, lots of custom development or devops/infra work work got replaced with SaaS and iPaaS cloud products, serverless/lambda, managed containers.

This is the next step.

Great that people feel more productive, unfortunely for many of them, us, more productivity means the C-suites can do some head count reduction yet again.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#468

Post by kai_mac »

elbasti wrote: post #125
tonmoy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im not sure I follow. AI barely consumes energy compared to other industries and instead of focusing on the heavy hitters first wasting time on the climate impact on AI doesn’t seem useful

This is wrong. AI uses ~4% of the US grid, and projections are that it will grow to 10%+ in the next 6 years. And most of that new capacity will be natural gas. That increase would basically whipe out the reduction in CO2 emissions the USA has had since 2018.

The 4% figure is for data centres generally afaik, and it's pre-AI

Of course nearly all of that growth is going to be AI

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#469

Post by eudamoniac »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #233
overgard wrote: post #89

I'm like 99% convinced that most of the AI conversation upvotes at this point is astroturfing. I just don't see the correlation with the sentiment I get from talking to people in the real world (mostly negative AI sentiment) vs what I see here

I think some companies are just behind the curve, so this sentiment seems bizarre to some. At my big tech, AI is every conversation with everyone, every day. Becoming AI native is a huge deal for us. Literally everyone is making AI usage a core part of their job and it's been a big productivity accelerator. Perhaps it's different where you work, so you don't see the sentiment.

As someone working somewhere very much like this, the "everyone" mentioned is actually a few people who are under the mistaken impression that the rest, keeping their head down, are equally interested and on board.

Your post was written almost verbatim by my coworker last week, who has no idea that I and half the team are not doing any of this stuff.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#470

Post by eudamoniac »

xvector wrote: post #427
onemoresoop wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Follow closely on what the detractors say. Most of them are using AI themselves and are just pushing back on the hype or other ludicrous claims and that's a good thing. Is the current crop of Gen AI anything near AGI? Is it worth the current valuation? Can a company fire most staff and run on gen AI? We may see the economy completely crash and not because AI takes over but because of bad investments, hype and greed.

The same detractors I know today that use AI, said that LLMs were useless slop generators that would never amount to anything just a year or two ago. Detractors, doomers, and techno-pessimists have got to be the most consistently wrong group in history. https://pessimistsarchive.org/

I've made tens of thousands of dollars so far by day trading puts on NVDA. As a detractor et al, at least I'm putting my money where my mouth is eh
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