Everyone who has been told AI is a panacea by executive leadership who barely understand it feels this way.
But AI takes job of average "western" IT employee.
Like in meme AI stands for Actually Indians.
Everyone in Seattle hates AI
501–510 of 1001 posts
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#502Earlier 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…
> The fact that LLMs are trained on a corpus does not mean their output represents the median skill level of the corpus.
It does, by default. Try asking ChatGPT to implement quicksort in JavaScript, the result will be dogshit. Of course it can do better if you guide it, but that implies you recognize dogshit, or at least that you use some sort of prompting technique that will veer it off the beaten path.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#503Ex-Google here; there are many people both current and past-Google that feel the same way as the composite coworker in the linked post. I haven't escaped this mindset myself. I'm convinced there are a small number of places where LLMs make truly effective tools (see: generation of "must be plausible, need not be accurate" data, e.g. concept art or crowd animations in movies), a large number of places where LLMs make…
Is it true that it's bad for learning new skills? My gut tells me it's useful as long as I don't use it to cheat the learning process and I mainly use it for things like follow up questions.
It is, it can be an enormous learning accelerator for new skills, for both adults and genuinely curious kids. The gap between low and high performancer will explode. I can tell you that if I had LLMs I would've finished schooling at least 25% quicker, while learning much more. When I say this on HN some are quick to point out the fallibility of LLMs, ignoring that the huge majority of human teachers are many times more fallible. Now this is a privileged place where many have been taught by what is indeed the global top 0.1% of teachers and professors, so it makes more sense that people would respond this way. Another source of these responses is simply fear.
In e.g. the US, it's a huge net negative because kids aren't probably taught these values and the required discipline. So the overwhelming majority does use it to cheat the learning process.
I can't tell you if this is the same inside e.g. China. I'm fairly sure it's not nearly as bad though as kids there derive much less benefit from cheating on homework/the learning process, as they're more singularly judged on standardized tests where AI is not available.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#504Ex-Google here; there are many people both current and past-Google that feel the same way as the composite coworker in the linked post. I haven't escaped this mindset myself. I'm convinced there are a small number of places where LLMs make truly effective tools (see: generation of "must be plausible, need not be accurate" data, e.g. concept art or crowd animations in movies), a large number of places where LLMs make…
I also hoped it would crash and burn. The real value added usecases will remain. The overhyped crap won't.
But the shockwave will cause a huge recession and all those investors that put up trillions will not take their losses. Rich people never get poorer. One way or another us consumers will end up paying for their mistakes. Either by huge inflation, job losses, energy costs, service enshittification whatever. We're already seeing the memory crisis having huge knock on effects with next year's phones being much more expensive. That's one of the ways we are going to be paying for this circus.
I really see value in it too, sure. But the amount of investment that goes into it is insane. It's not that valuable by far. LLMs are not good for everything and the next big thing is still a big question mark. AI is dragged in by the hair into usecases where it doesn't belong. The same shit we saw with blockchains, but now on a world crashing scale. It's very scary seeing so much insanity.
But anyway whatever I think doesn't matter. Whatever happens will happen.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can vibe-code a throwaway UI for investigating some complex data in less than 30 minutes. The code quality doesn't matter, and it will make your life much easier. Rinse and repeat for many "one-off" tasks. It's not going away, you need to learn how to use it. shrugs shoulders
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.
It's like watching somebody argue that code linting is going to change the face of the world and the rebuttals to the skeptics are arguing that akshually code linting is quite useful....
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#506Earlier 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.
It starts to make you realize how unaware many people must be of what their programs are doing to accept AI stuff wholesale.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#507Earlier 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…
The best argument I've yet heard against the effectiveness of AI tools for SW dev is the absence of an explosion of shovelware over the past 1-2 years.
https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
Basically, if the tools are even half as good as some proponents claim, wouldn't you expect at least a significant increase in simple games on Steam or apps in app stores over that time frame? But we're not seeing that.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Outside of tech, I think the opinion is generally negative. AI has lost a lot the narrative due to things like energy prices and layoffs.
Globally, the opinion isn't generally negative. It's localized.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#509Roughly a third of the engineers in the greater Seattle area work for Microsoft, so we needn't conjure up any strange quality of the local culture to explain this.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#510I am not in Seattle. I do work in AI but have shifted more towards infrastructure. I feel fatigued by AI. To be more precise, this fatigue includes several factors. The first one is that a lot of people around me get excited by events in the AI world that I find distracting. These might be new FOSS library releases, news announcements from the big players, new models, new papers. As one person, I can only work on 2-3…
I get excited by new model releases, try it, switch it to default if I feel it's better, and then I move on. I don't understand why any professional SWE should engage in weird cultish behavior about these models, it's a better mousetrap as far as I'm concerned