591–600 of 1001 posts
I think we've passed the threshold beyond which not using AI is just doing things the hard way for no appreciable gain.
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 pe…
I disagree with this being unique to AI because every improved technology since the automated loom has concentrated wealth and power. AI is an improved technology so it'll do so also.
I disagree that engineers are uniquely equipped to do anything about this fact because the solution to wealth concentration due to improved technology has basically nothing to do with technology and everything to do with sociology and politics.
Our technology keeps improving and I keep being surprised to hear people say "ah, with our improved efficiency, we can finally work ten hours a week and kick our feet up." The first people to say that were the luddites and when they found out that wasn't to be the case, they burned down factories about it. Why do we think it will suddenly be different for this specific technology?
I agree we should do something about it but I don't think the solution involves code.
The problem is not about quality of the code, it simply almost never works. Just tried some models still in beta on the code of one of the C projects and, while some pieces were okay and could be used as is, some are complete garbage and wouldn't even compile. Maybe few years later it will not become a problem but right now they are useless. For the AI-assisted research and internet search, that's a different thing a…
I’ve yet to witness this myself but that’s with my interactions. Which are limited to free offerings.
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 pe…
Here's my historical take: in the 1960s and 1970s, computation in general was viewed as a sinister, authoritarian thing. Many people assumed it was going to be that way, and a small minority recognised that it also had the potential to empower and grant autonomy to a wider class of people. These were the advocates of the personal computer revolution -- the idea of "computer lib", whereby the tools of control would be inverted and provided to the people at large.
You can argue about whether that strategy was a success or not, but the group tht was largely irrelevant to that fight were the people who decided not to get involved, or to try (although not very hard) to impede the development of computation in general.
To bend the trajectory of AI in general involves understanding and redeploying it, rather than rejecting it. It also involves engaging. If it's anything like the last few times, the group that is simultaneously exploring and attempting to provide agency and autonomy for the maximum number of people will be smaller than both those using new tech to exploit people or maintain an unequal status quo, and the people who have good intentions, but throw their hands up at the possibility of using their skills to seize control of the means that provide for a better future.
This article does not touch on the thing which worries me the most with respect to LLMs: the dependence . Unless you can run the LLM locally, on a computer you own, you are now completely dependent on a remote centralized system to do your work. Whoever controls that system can arbitrarily raise the prices, subtly manipulate the outputs, store and do anything they want with the inputs, or even suddenly cease to opera…
"Kids today don’t just use agents; they use asynchronous agents. They wake up, free-associate 13 different things for their LLMs to work on, make coffee, fill out a TPS report, drive to the Mars Cheese Castle, and then check their notifications. They’ve got 13 PRs to review. Three get tossed and re-prompted. Five of them get the same feedback a junior dev gets. And five get merged." I would jump off a bridge before I…
It rings about as authentic as "everybody stood up and clapped"
The reaction to this article is interesting. I have found AI to be useful in software contexts that most people never exercise or expect based on their intuitions of what an LLM can do. For me, a highly productive but boring use of LLMs for code is that they excel at providing midwit “best practice” solutions to common problems. They are better documentation than the documentation and can do a lot of leg work e.g. Li…
Getting good code is still a pain with chat, but you can go a fair way by reducing the context as much as possible and only asking for core functions (no point wasting hundreds of tokens on an arg parser). I'd like to play with Cursor or Zed a bit more.
Debugging sometimes works. 4.5 often figures out errors in one, 4o often struggles and spits out suggestions like it's a customer support agent (it also falls into repetition fairly often if you tell it "no, so what else could it be?"). You really have to work to convince it up front that you're not an idiot.
The privacy aspect and other security risks tho? So far all the praise I hear on productivity are from people using cloud-hosted models. Claude, Gemini, Copilot and and ChatGPT are non-starters for privacy-minded folks. So far, local experiements with agents have left me underwhelmed. Tried everything on ollama that can run on my dedicated Ryzen 8700G with 96GB DDR5. I'm ready to blow ~10-15k USD on a better rig if I…
Devstral (mistral small fine-tuned for agentic use coding) w/ cline has been above expectations for me.
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 pe…
You need to lookup how much an "average" human consumes. When I replace 2 humans with a ChatGPT subscription, I can guarantee you that OpenAI is generating less co2 than what these two interns were creating with their transport to the office (and back). That's before we consider things like the 25 years it took to raise and train them or the very expensive tastes (eg. Travelling around the world) they get after they earn a large salary.