581–590 of 1001 posts
From the article: > I wanted her take on Wanderfugl , the AI-powered map I've been building full-time. I can at least give you one piece of advice. Before you decide on a company or product name, take the time to speak it out loud so you can get a sense of how it sounds.
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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…
Ex-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 have been mostly been paid to work on AI projects since 1982, but I want to pull my hair out and scream over the big push in the USA to develop super-AGI. Such a waste of resources and such a hit on society that needs resources used for better purposes.
As a Seattle SWE, I'd say most of my coworkers do hate all the time-wasting AI stuff being shoved down our throats. There are a few evangelical AI boosters I do work with, but I keep catching mistakes in their code that they didn't used to make. Large suites of elegant looking unit tests, but the unit tests include large amounts of code duplicating functionality of the test framework for no reason, and I've even seen…
As another Seattle SWE, I'll go against the grain and say that I think AI is going to change the nature of the market for labor for SWE's and my guess would be for the negative. People need to remember that the ability of AI in code generation today is the worst that it ever will be, and it's only going to improve from here. If you were to just judge by the sentiment on HN, you would think no coder worth their weight…
In general I think -> if I was not personally invested in this situation (i.e. another man on the street) what would be my immediate reaction to this? Would I still become a software engineer as an example? Even if it is doesn't come to past, given what I know now, would I take that bet with my life/career?
I think if people were honest with themselves sadly the answer for many would probably be "no". Most other professions wouldn't do this to themselves either; SWE is quite unique in this regard.
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I use and pay for Wanderlog. Idk how their business is doing, but I love it as a user. They use an embedded Google Maps viewer for locations, so there is no problem for coverage.
> They use an embedded Google Maps viewer for locations If they become popular they'll have to move to OSM, Google's steep charging for their Maps API at high usage that has brought companies to their knees is well known [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35089776
For now, they do use Google Maps and I’m happy with it. If they stop and it’s no longer as useful to me, maybe I’ll stop using it.
I feel like there is an absurd amount of negative rhetoric about how AI doesn't have any real world use cases in this comment thread. I do believe that the product leadership is shoehorning it into every nook and cranny of the world right now and there are reasons to be annoyed by that but there are also countless incredible use cases that are mind blowing, that you can use it every day for. I need to write about som…
Yep.
I feel like actually, being negative on AI is the common view now, even though every other HN commenter thinks they’re the only contrarian in the world to see the light and surely the masses must be misguided for not seeing it their way.
The same way people love to think they’re cooler than the masses by hating [famous pop artist]. “But that’s not real music!” they cry.
And that’s fine. Frankly, most of my AI skeptic friends are missing out on a skill that’s helped me a fair bit in my day to day at work and casually. Their loss.
Like it or not, LLMs are here to stay. The same way social media boomed and was here to stay, the same way e-commerce boomed and was here to stay… there’s now a whole new vertical that didn’t exist before.
Of course there will be washouts over time as the hype subsides, but who cares? LLMs are still wicked cool to me.
I don’t even work in AI, I just think they’re fascinating. The same way it was fascinating to me when I made a computer say “Hello, world!” for the first time.
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> What I never understand is the population of coders that don’t see any value in coding agents or are aggressively against them, or people that deride LLMs as failing to be able to do X (or hallucinate etc) and are therefore useless and every thing is AI Slop, without recognizing that what we can do today is almost unrecognizeable from the world of 3 years ago. I don't recognize that because it isn't true . I try th…
This fascinates me. Just observing but because it hasn't worked for you, everyone else must be lying? (I'm assuming that's what you mean by baseless) How does that bridge get built? I can provide tangible real life examples but I've found push back from that in other online conversations.
I do also try and use Claude Code for certain tasks. More often than not, i regret it, but I've started to zero in on tasks it's helpful with (configuration and debugging, not so much coding).
But it's very easy then for me to hear people saying that AI gives them so much useful code, and for me to assume that they are like my boss: not examining that code carefully, or not holding their output to particularly high standards, or aren't responsible for the maintenance and thus don't need to care. That doesn't mean they're lying, but it doesn't mean they're right.
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I use and pay for Wanderlog. Idk how their business is doing, but I love it as a user. They use an embedded Google Maps viewer for locations, so there is no problem for coverage.
Love Wanderlog! But I use it as a glorified notes app to keep track of flights, reservations, rental cars, confirmation numbers, etc, in one place, not for trip planning.
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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.
I notice that expert tends to be pretty bimodal. e.g. chef either enjoy really well made food or some version of scrappy fast food comfort they grew up eating.
It’s the mid-range with pretensions that gets squeezed out. I absolutely do not need a $40 bottle of wine to accompany my takeout curry, I definitely don’t need truffle slices added to my carbonara, and I don’t need to hand-roll conceptually simple code.
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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.
Anecdotally its almost like they see them like mad scientists who are happy blowing up themselves and the world if they get to play with the new toy; almost childlike usually thinking they are doing "good" in the process. Which is seen as a sign of a lack of a type of intelligence/maturity by most people.