Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I don't care how well your "AI" works

fokus.cool

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 808 posts

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#651

Post by k6hkUZtLUM »

shadowgovt wrote: post #379
easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…

Hackers in the '80s were taking apart phone hardware and making free long-distance calls because the phone company didn't deserve its monopoly purely for existing before they were born. Hackers in the '90s were bypassing copyright and wiping the hard drive of machines they cobbled together out of broken machines to install an open source OS on it so that Redmond, WA couldn't dictate their computing experience. I thin…

The whole point was to take these things apart, figure out how they work, and make them things we want them to do instead of being bound by arbitrary rules.

Bypassing arbitrary (useless, silly, meaningless, etc) rules has always been a primary motiving factor for some of us :D

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#652

Post by lxgr »

sosodev wrote: post #467
bluefirebrand wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I'm watching people I used to respect start to rely on AI more and more and their skills and knowledge are declining rapidly while their reliance is growing, so I'm really not interested in following that path They seem just as enthusiastic as many of the pro AI voices here on HN, while the quality of their work declines. It makes me extremely skeptical of anyone who is enthusiastic about AI. It seems to m…

How do you know their skills and knowledge are declining rapidly? Does using an LLM cause one to suddenly forget everything?

I could definitely see that happen. Besides people simply getting out of practice (or never getting any to being with), automation complacency is a real problem.

We'll need to be even more intentional about when to use LLMs than we should arguably already be about any type of automation.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#653

Post by embedding-shape »

conradfr wrote: post #142
embedding-shape wrote: post #20

> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…

I didn't enter this profession because I love reviewing code though.

It is a part of gaining experience and knowledge though. If you aren't a senior right now, eventually you will be, and one of the expectations will be that you can read and review more novice programmers code and help them improve it, and lend a helping hand when you can. Eventually, all you do will be to review the work others have done after you instructing them to do the thing. Not to mention reading through really great written programs is personally a great joy for me, and almost always learn something new.

But, probably remaining a developer who runs through tickets in JIRA without much care for collaboration could be feasible in some type of companies too.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#654

Post by embedding-shape »

an0malous wrote: post #472
embedding-shape wrote: post #20

> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…

I think comments like yours should include what salary range, industry, and company size your job entails. The last few years have been absolutely miserable for me at Series A YC startups

Salary range: 400 > 8000 EUR (monthly) over the years (starting job 10 years ago > last full-time salary)

Industry I guess would be "startups" or just "tech", it ranges across holiday related, infrastructure, distributed networks, application development frameworks and some others.

Smallest company I worked at was 4 including the CEO, largest been 300 people. Most of them I joined when it was 5-10 people, and left once they got to around 100.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#655

Post by QuercusMax »

octorian wrote: post #428
anubistheta wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I think this is what happens when a persons transitions from a progressive mindset to a conservative one, but has made being "progressive" a central tenant of their identity. Progressiveness is forward looking and a proponent of rapid change. So it is natural that LLM's are popular amongst that crowd. Also, progressivism should be accepting of and encouraging the evolution of concepts and social constructs.…

Just seeing that sentence fragment about "structures of power and violence" told me so much about the author. Its the sort of language that brings with it a whole host of stereotypes, some of which were immediately confirmed with a little more digging (and others would require way too much effort to confirm, but likely could be). And yes, this whole "capitalism bad" mentality I see in tech does kinda irk me. Why? Bec…

You're completely ignoring the huge amount of public money that went into building the Internet and doing research.

Capitalism didn't build the internet: public spending did.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#656

Post by lxgr »

intended wrote: post #418
lxgr wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, not the old "AI is the new crypto" trope. Various people have been wrong on various predictions in the past, and it seems to me that any implied strong overlap is anecdotal at best and wishful (why?) thinking at worst. The only really embarrassing behavior is never updating your priors when your predictions are wrong. Also, if you're always right about all your prognoses, you should probably also not be in th…

That’s an old trope? It really is the first time I’m seeing it.

It's a whole thing, yes.

Just because

- crypto was massively hyped and then crashed (although it's more than recovered),

- many grifters chase hypes, and

- there's undeniably an AI hype going on at the moment

doesn't necessarily imply that AI is full of grifters or confirms any adjacent theories (as in, could be true, could be false, but the argument does not hold).

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#657

Post by QuercusMax »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #456
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even if their progress had been faster, now they are a capable developer who can command higher compensation that statistically your company won’t give them and they are going to jump ship anyway.

One didn't even wait, they immediately tried to sub-contract the work out to a third party and make a transition from a consultant to a consultancy company. I had to be clear that they are hired as named person and I very much do care about who does the work.While not FANG comp it was ~2x the market rates, statistically I think they'd have a hard time matching that somewhere else. I think in part because I was offeri…

I think I see the problem: you're running a consulting company, and complaining that your mercenaries aren't very good or loyal.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#658

Post by embedding-shape »

overflow897 wrote: post #196
embedding-shape wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in the end, we didn't end up with less factories that do more, we ended up with more factories that does more. Why wouldn't the same happen here? Instead of these programmers jamming out boilerplate 24/7, why are they unable to improve their skill further and move with the rest of the industry, if that's needed? Just like other professions adopt to how society is shaped, why should programming be an exception to…

And how is the quality of life for those factory workers? It's almost like the craft of making physical things has been devalued even if we're making more physical things than ever.

If you live in a country where worker's health and lives are valued, pretty good. 98% of them are in a union, so they can't get fired from nowhere, they have reliable salary each month, free healthcare (as everyone else in the country) and they can turn off when they come home. Most of them work on rotation, so usually you'd do one week of one station, then one week of another station, and so on, so it doesn't get too repetitive. Lots of quality of life improvements are still happening, even for these workers.

Of course, I won't claim it's glamorous or anything, but the idea that factory workers somehow will disappear tomorrow feels far out there, and I'm generally optimistic about the future.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#659

Post by retsibsi »

ceejayoz wrote: post #257
lxgr wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like various hackers came to various different conclusions from trying them out, then. Why feign surprise about this?

Why not? I was surprised how hard many here fell for the NFT thing, too.

> I was surprised how hard many here fell for the NFT thing, too.

Did they? I'm not saying you're wrong but I'd like to see some evidence, because NFTs were always obvious nonsense. I'm sure there were some grifters posting here, and others playing devil's advocate or refuting anti-NFT arguments that somehow went too far, but I'd be genuinely surprised if the general sentiment was not overwhelmingly negative/dismissive.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#660

Post by adrr »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #393

I feel like in a sci-fi world with robots, teleportation and holodecks these people would decide to stay at home and hand wash the dishes. If an amazing world changing technology like LLMs shows up on your doorstep and your response is to ignore it and write blog posts about how you don't care about it then you aren't curious and you aren't really a hacker.

Dishwasher use is correlated to allergies in children.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25713281/

Post reply on HN