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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#551

Post by tpmoney »

Aurornis wrote: post #414

I tried to take this article seriously, but it seems more like HN ragebait than an actual attempt at discussion. The engagement bait appears to be working, given all of the comments. It’s like half of the arguments are designed as engagement bait with logical consistency being a distant concern: > If hallucination matters to you, your programming language has let you down. This doesn’t even make sense. LLMs hallucina…

> This doesn’t even make sense. LLMs hallucinate things beyond simple programming language constructs. I commonly deal with allusions to functions or library methods that would be great if they existed, but the LLM made it up on the spot.

I think the author's point is your language (and more generally the tooling around it) should make this obvious, and almost all the AI agents these days will minimally run linting tools and clean up lints (which would include methods and library imports that don't exist) if they don't actively attempt to compile and test the code they've written. So you as the end user should (almost) never be seeing these made up functions.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#552

Post by [deleted] »

notnullorvoid wrote: post #546

I like LLMs, it's legitimately impressive to see people vibe code solutions (some times even to novel ideas). Agents are a much better use of LLMs than auto complete (which is terrible). However I've tried coding agents, and well they suck... for me. Nearly all of the code I write these days is performance sensitive, as well as design sensitive (making abstractions for others to use), and not close to what could be c…

[deleted]

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#553

Post by 0x1ceb00da »

pie_flavor wrote: post #46

I have one very specific retort to the 'you are still responsible' point. High school kids write lots of notes. The notes frequently never get read, but the performance is worse without them: the act of writing them embeds them into your head. I allegedly know how to use a debugger, but I haven't in years: but for a number I could count on my fingers, nearly every bug report I have gotten I know exactly down to the l…

Talking to an LLM feels like talking to Leonard Shelby from memento. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y3kNTvXVHvQ

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#554

Post by coliveira »

gdubs wrote: post #6

One thing that I find truly amazing is just the simple fact that you can now be fuzzy with the input you give a computer, and get something meaningful in return. Like, as someone who grew up learning to code in the 90s it always seemed like science fiction that we'd get to a point where you could give a computer some vague human level instructions and get it more or less do what you want.

Sure, you can now be fuzzy with the input you give to computers, but in return the computer will ALSO be fuzzy with the answer it gives back. That's the drawback of modern AI.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#555

Post by evantbyrne »

> Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs.

The cost is a pretty obvious indication that it's nowhere near the capability of an engineer. A robotic worker that can produce code 24/7 without tiring would be worth even more than a person of equivalent skill. I don't know what kinds of goofy hiring ya'll are doing, but all of the juniors I've been involved in hiring actually worked out great.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#556

Post by mkfs »

> Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property.

> The median dev thinks Star Wars and Daft Punk are a public commons. The great cultural project of developers has been opposing any protection that might inconvenience a monetizable media-sharing site. When they fail at policy, they route around it with coercion. They stand up global-scale piracy networks and sneer at anybody who so much as tries to preserve a new-release window for a TV show.

This is pretty disingenuous and mean-spirited. He's using SV startup types to smear all developers, including the typical, humble, un- or undercompensated FOSS dev who absolutely respects intellectual property, and quite reasonably, expects their own IP to be respected as well. But because Sam Altman types follow the "It's Better to Beg for Forgiveness than to Ask for Permission" rule, altruistic, non-sociopathic developers have no right to complain?

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#557

Post by jszymborski »

The argument that I've heard against LLMs for code is that they create bugs that, by design, are very difficult to spot.

The LLM has one job, to make code that looks plausible. That's it. There's no logic gone into writing that bit of code. So the bugs often won't be like those a programmer makes. Instead, they can introduce a whole new class of bug that's way harder to debug.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#558

Post by habosa »

I’m an AI skeptic. I’m probably wrong. This article makes me feel kinda wrong. But I desperately want to be right.

Why? Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze. It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of people who I don’t trust. And it will do all of this while consuming truly shocking amounts of energy.

Not only do I think these things will happen, I think the Altmans of the world would eagerly agree that they will happen. They just think it will be interesting / profitable for them. It won’t be for us.

And we, the engineers, are in a unique position. Unlike people in any other industry, we can affect the trajectory of AI. My skepticism (and unwillingness to aid in the advancement of AI) might slow things down a billionth of a percent. Maybe if there are more of me, things will slow down enough that we can find some sort of effective safeguards on this stuff before it’s out of hand.

So I’ll keep being skeptical, until it’s over.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#559

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

bccdee wrote: post #467

To quote an excellent article from last week: > The AI has suggested a solution, but the added code is arguably useless or wrong. There is a huge decision space to consider, but the AI tool has picked one set of decisions, without any rationale for this decision. > [...] > Programming is about lots of decisions, large and small. Architecture decisions. Data validation decisions. Button color decisions. > Some decisio…

At least when you mentor an actual junior developer they often learn, and you can take satisfaction in aiding the growth of a human being. All the time and effort spent coaxing an LLM to "do better" either disappears in a puff of smoke the next time it goes schizoid and needs to have its context cleared or- at best- is recorded to help a for-profit company train their next generation of products.

Like everything else about the "GenAI" fad, it boils down to extractively exploiting goodwill and despoiling the commons in order to convert VC dollars into penny-shavings.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#560

Post by jumploops »

gdubs wrote: post #6

One thing that I find truly amazing is just the simple fact that you can now be fuzzy with the input you give a computer, and get something meaningful in return. Like, as someone who grew up learning to code in the 90s it always seemed like science fiction that we'd get to a point where you could give a computer some vague human level instructions and get it more or less do what you want.

Computers finally work they way they were always supposed to work :)
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