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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#621

Post by dreamcompiler »

canjobear wrote: post #463
buildsjets wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the most depressing things I have ever read on Hacker News. You claim to have become so de-actualized as a human being that you cannot fulfill the most basic items of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (food, health, personal security, shelter, transportation) without the aid of an LLM.

Extremely uncharitable reading. Plausibly they were in a foreign country where they didn't speak any of the language and didn't know how anything worked. This kind of situation was never easy for anyone.

I have been in situations where either I or someone in my party was sick and needed medical care in a foreign country where I didn't speak the language. In all cases I used my brain to figure out a solution quickly without the aid of CharGPT, and the trip continued on.

This falls in the category of life skills or maybe just "adulting." Sure, maybe ChatGPT can be considered a life skill, but you need others compiled into your brain to fall back on when it fails. If ChatGPT is the only skill you have, what do you do if your phone gets stolen?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#622

Post by lazystar »

toast0 wrote: 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…

speaking of caves...

I just picked up an old gamecube. it's refreshing to play purely offline content from an age without any AI art of any kind. some games, like animal crossing, will break in 2031 though, so there's only a good 5 more years left to enjoy it.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#624

Post by rprend »

nilkn wrote: post #551
CSMastermind wrote: post #223

Earlier 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.

People who've spent their life perfecting a craft are exactly the people you'd expect would be most negative about something genuinely disrupting that craft. There is significant precedent for this. It's happened repeatedly in history. Really smart, talented people routinely and in fact quite predictably resist technology that disrupts their craft, often even at great personal cost within their own lifetime.

Yes you get it. Obviously “writing code” will die. It will hold on in legacy systems that need bespoke maintenance, like COBOL systems have today. There will be artisanal coders, like there are artisanal blacksmiths, who do it the old fashioned way, and we will smile and encourage them. Within 20 years, writing code syntax will be like writing assembly: something they make you do in school, something that your dad reminds you about the good old days.

I talked to someone who was in denial about this, until he said he had conflated writing code with solving problems. Solving problems isn’t going anywhere! Solving problems: you observe a problem, write out a solution, implement that solution, measure the problem again, consider your metrics, then iterate.

“Implement it” can mean writing code, like the past 40 years, but it hasn’t always been. Before coding, it was economics and physics majors, who studied and implemented scientific management. For the next 20 years, it will be “describe the tool to Claude code and use the result”.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#625

Post by sodafountan »

rpcope1 wrote: post #192
binary132 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is at 93k so I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to say blockchain is insubstantive or without value

There can be a bunch of crazy people trading each other various lumps of dog feces for increasing sums of cash, that doesn't mean dogshit is particularly valuable or substantive either.

And by "dog feces," I assume you mean fiat currency, correct?

Cryptocurrency solves the money-printing problem we've had around the world since we left the gold standard. If governments stopped making their currencies worthless, then bitcoin would go to zero.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#626

Post by parineum »

pier25 wrote: post #469
shepardrtc wrote: post #50

Ok so a few thoughts as a former Seattleite: 1. You were a therapy session for her. Her negativity was about the layoffs. 2. FAANG companies dramatically overhired for years and are using AI as an excuse for layoffs. 3. AI scene in Seattle is pretty good, but as with everywhere else was/is a victim of the AI hype. I see estimates of the hype being dead in a year. AI won't be dead, but throwing money at the whatever U…

It’s not only the hype though. What about the complete lack of morality some (most?) AI companies exhibit? What about the consequences in the environment? What about the enshitification of products? What about the usage of water and energy? Etc.

Is your "etc." keep repeating the same two points you did in your list of four?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#627

Post by nunez »

CSMastermind wrote: post #223
pkasting wrote: post #40

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…

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.

Makes sense to me.

From the outside, the AI push at Google very closely resembles the death march that Google+ but immensely more intense from the entire tech ecosystem following suit.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#628

Post by eru »

pkasting wrote: post #40

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…

> [...] a large number of places where LLMs make apparently-effective tools that have negative long-term consequences (see: anything involving learning a new skill, [...]

Don't people learn from imperfect teachers all the time?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#629

Post by sodafountan »

skybrian wrote: post #258
binary132 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is at 93k so I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to say blockchain is insubstantive or without value

This seems to be almost purely bandwagon value, like preferring Coca-Cola to some other drink. There are other blockchains that are better technically along a bunch of dimensions, but they don't have the mindshare. Bitcoin is probably unkillable. Even if were to crash, it won't be hard to round up enough true believers to boost it up again. But it's technically stagnant.

Technically stagnant is a good thing; I'd prefer the term technically mature. It's accomplished what it set out to do, which is to be a decentralized, anonymous form of digital currency.

The only thing that MIGHT kill it is if governments stopped printing money.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#630

Post by zeroonetwothree »

nikkwong wrote: post #548
sirreal14 wrote: post #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…

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…

> People need to remember that the ability of AI in code generation today is the worst that it ever will be

I've been reading this since 2023 and yet it hasn't really improved all that much. The same things are still problems that were problems back then. And if anything the improvement is slowing down, not speeding up.

I suspect unless we have real AGI we won't have human-level coding from AIs.

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