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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#481

Post by scotty79 »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #431
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.

I’m an AI skeptic. I like seeing what UIs it spits out, though, which defeats the blank page staring into my soul fear nicely. I don’t even use the code, just take inspiration from the layouts.

Yeah, it helps a lot to make first steps, to overcome writers block, to make you put into words what you'd like to have built.

At one point you might take over, ask it for specific refactors you'd do but are too lazy to do yourself. Or even toss it away entirely and start fresh with better understanding. Yourself or again with agent.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#482

Post by adriand »

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…

I’m starting to believe there are situations where the human code review is genuinely not necessary. Here’s a concrete example of something that’s been blowing my mind. I have 25 years of professional coding experience but it’s almost all web, with a few years of iOS in the objective C era. I’m also an amateur electronic musician. A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about this plugin that I used to love until the company that made it went under. I’ve long considered trying to make a replacement but I don’t know the first thing about DSP or C++.

You know where this is going. I asked Claude if audio plugins were well represented in its training data, it said yes, off I went. I can’t review the code because I lack the expertise. It’s all C++ with a lot of math and the only math I’ve needed since college is addition and calculating percentages. However, I can have intelligent discussions about design and architecture and music UX. That’s been enough to get me a functional plugin that already does more in some respects than the original. I am (we are?) making it steadily more performant. It has only crashed twice and each time I just pasted the dump into Claude and it fixed the root cause.

Long story short: if you can verify the outcome, do you need to review the code? It helps that no one dies or gets underpaid if my audio plugin crashes. But still, you can’t tell me this isn’t remarkable. I think it’s clear there will be a massive proliferation of niche software.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#484

Post by triceratops »

rpcope1 wrote: post #192
binary132 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is at 93k so I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to say blockchain is insubstantive or without value

There can be a bunch of crazy people trading each other various lumps of dog feces for increasing sums of cash, that doesn't mean dogshit is particularly valuable or substantive either.

I'd argue even dogshit has more practical use than Bitcoin, if no one paid money for Bitcoin. You can throw it for self-defence, compost it (under high heat to kill the germs), put it on your property to scare away raccoons (it works sometimes).

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#485

Post by spit2wind »

> Bring up AI in a Seattle coffee shop now and people react like you're advocating asbestos.

I don't know who first uses the asbestos analogy, but it's 1000% on point.

I think Cory Doctrow says it best,

"AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our society — and our descendants will be digging it out for generations."

I believe that's exactly the language to combat AI hype.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#486

Post by sethherr »

panarky wrote: post #475
josephg wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yeah. And because when an expert looks at the code chatgpt produces, the flaws are more obvious. It programs with the skill of the median programmer on GitHub. For beginners and people who do cookie cutter work, this can be incredible because it writes the same or better code they could write, fast and for free. But for experts, the code it produces is consistently worse than what we can do. At best my pride dem…

> It programs with the skill of the median programmer on GitHub This is a common intuition but it's provably false. The fact that LLMs are trained on a corpus does not mean their output represents the median skill level of the corpus. Eighteen months ago GPT-4 was outperforming 85% of human participants in coding contests. And people who participate in coding contests are already well above the median skill level on…

Trying to figure out how to align this with my experiences (which match the parents’ comment), and I have an idea:

Coding contests are not like my job at all.

My job is taking fuzzy human things and making code that solves it. Frankly AI isn’t good at closing open issues on open source projects either.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#487

Post by spwa4 »

citizenpaul wrote: post #472
karmasimida wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the problem. AI is optimized to solve a problem no matter what it takes. It will try to solve one problem by creating 10 more. I think long time/term agentic AI is just snake oil at this point. AI works best if you can segment your task into 5-10 minutes chunks, including the AI generating time, correcting time and engineer review time. To put it another way, a 10 minute sync with human is necessary, otherwis…

> it just makes software engineering into bothering supervisor job. I'm pretty sure this is the entire enthusiasm from C-level for AI in a nutshell. Until AI SWE resisted being mashed into a replaceable cog job that they don't have to think/care about. AI is the magic beans that are just tantalizingly out of reach and boy do they want it.

But every version of AI for almost a century had this property, right down from the first vocoders that were going to replace entire callcenters to convolutional AI that was going to give us self-driving cars. Yes, a century, vocoders were 1930s technology, but they can essentially read the time aloud.

... except they didn't. In fact most AI tech were good for a nice demo and little else.

In some cases, really unfairly. For instance, convnet map matching doesn't work well not because it doesn't work well, but because you can't explain to humans when it won't work well. It's unpredictable, like a human. If you ask a human to map a building in heavy fog they may come back with "sorry". SLAM with lidar is "better", except no, it's a LOT worse. But when it fails it's very clear why it fails because it's a very visual algorithm. People expect of AIs that they can replace humans but that doesn't work, because people also demand AIs never say no, never fail, like the Star Trek computer (the only problem the star trek computer ever has is that it is misunderstood or follows policy too well). If you have a delivery person occasionally they will radically modify the process, or refuse to deliver. No CEO is ever going to allow an AI drone to change the process and No CEO will ever accept "no" from an AI drone. More generally, no business person seems to ever accept a 99% AI solution, and all AI solutions are 99%, or actually mostly less.

AI winters. I get the impression another one is coming, and I can feel it's going to be a cold one. But in 10 years, LLMs will be in a lot of stuff, like with every other AI winter. A lot of stuff ... but a lot less than CEOs are declaring it will be in today.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#488

Post by thinkling »

mips_avatar wrote: post #78
epolanski wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, do it assuming different linguistic backgrounds. It could sound dramatically different by people that speak English but as second language, which are going to be a whole lot of your users, even if the application is in English.

It's pronounced wanderfull in Norwegian

The one current paying user of the app I've seen in this discussion called it "Wanderlog". FYI on the stickiness of the current name.
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