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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

61–70 of 1001 posts

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#61

> My former coworker—the composite of three people for anonymity—now believes she's both unqualified for AI work and *that AI isn't worth doing anyway*. *She's wrong on both counts*, but the culture made sure she'd land there. I'm not sure they're as wrong as these statements imply? Do we think there's more or less crap out now with the advent and pervasiveness of AI? Not just from random CEOs pushing things top down…

Oh but we're all supposed to swoon over the author's ability to make ANOTHER AI powered mapping solution! Probably vibecoded and bloated too. Just what we need, obviously all the haters are wrong! /s

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#62

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.

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.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#63

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…

It's the latest tech holy war. Tabs vs Spaces but more existential. I'm usually anti hype and I've been convinced of AI's use over and over when it comes to coding. And whenever I talk about it, I see that I come across as an evangelist. Some people appreciate that, online I get a lot of push back despite having tangible examples of how it has been useful.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#64

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.

Maybe that's why they didn't go with the English cognate i.e. Wanderfowl, since being foul isn't great branding

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#65
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 unit tests that mock the actual function under test. New features that actually already exist with more sane APIs. Code that is a tangled web of spaghetti. These people largely think AI is improving their speed but then their code isn't making it past code review. I worry about teams with less stringent code review cultures, modifying or improving these systems is going to be a major pain.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#66
post #33

> After a pause I tried to share how much better I've been feeling—how AI tools helped me learn faster, how much they accelerated my work on Wanderfugl. I didn't fully grok how tone deaf I was being though. She's drowning in resentment. Here's the deal. Everyone I know who is infatuated with AI shares things AI told them with me, unsolicited, and it's always so amazingly garbage, but they don't see it or they apologi…

I've recently found that it can be a useful substitute for stackoverflow. It does occasionally make shit up, but stackoverflow and forums searching also has a decently high miss rate as well, so that doesn't piss me off too much. And it's usually immediately obvious when a method doesn't exist, so it doesn't waste a lot of time for each incident.

Specifically I was using Gemini to answer questions about Godot specifically for C# (not gdscript or using the IDE, where documentation and forums support are stronger), and it was mostly quite good for that.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#67

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.

What? You don't want travel tips from an itinerant swinger? Or for itinerant swingers?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My creative writing teacher in college drilled the m dash into me. I can’t really write without them now

I think the presence of em dashes is a very poor metric for determining if something is AI generated. I'm not sure why it's so popular.

For me it is that they are wrongly used in this piece. Em dashes as appositives have the feel of interruption—like this—and are to be used very sparingly. They're a big bump in the narrative's flow, and are to be used only when you want a big bump. Otherwise appositives should be set off with commas, when the appositive is critical to the narrative, or parentheses (for when it isn't). Clause changes are similar—the em dash is the biggest interruption. Colons have a sense of finality: you were building up to this: and now it is here. Semicolons are for when you really can't break two clauses into two sentences with a full stop; a full stop is better most of the time. Like this. And so full stops should be your default clause splice when you're revising.

Having em-dashes everywhere—but each one or pair is used correctly—smacks of AI writing—AI has figured out how to use them, what they're for, and when they fit—but has not figured out how to revise text so that the overall flow of the text and overall density of them is correct—that is, low, because they're heavy emphasis—real interruptions.

(Also the quirky three-point bullet list with a three-point recitation at the end with bolded leadoffs to each bullet point and a final punchy closer sentence is totally an AI thing too.)

But, hey, I guess I fit the stereotype!—I'm in Seattle and I hate AI, too.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#69
I'm not surprised you're getting bad reactions from people who aren't already bought-in. You're starting from a firm "I'm right! They're wrong!" with no attempt to understand the other side. I'm sure that comes across not just in your writing

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#70
My 2¢... LLMs are kind of amazing for structured text output like code. I have a completely different experience using LLMs for assistance writing code (as a relative novice) than I do in literally every other avenue of life.

Electricl engineering? Garbage.

Construction projects? Useless.

But code is code everywhere, and the immense amount of training data available in the form of working code and tutorials, design and style guides, means that the output as regards software development doesn't really resemble what anybody working in any other field sees. Even adjacent technical fields.

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