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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#661

Post by forgotoldacc »

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…

As a gamedev, there's nothing I hate more than AI concept art. It's always soulless. The best thing about games is there's no limit to human imagination, and you can make whatever you want. But when we leave the imagination stage to a computer then leave the final brushing up to humans, we're getting the order completely backwards. It's bonkers and just disgusting to me.

That said, game engine documentation is often pretty hard to navigate. Most of the best information is some YouTube video recorded by some savant 15 year old with a busted microphone. And you need to skim through 30 minutes of video until you find what you need. The biggest problem is not knowing what you don't know, so it's hard to know where to begin. There are a lot of things you may think you need to spend 2 days implementing, but the engine may have a single function and a couple built in settings to do it.

Where LLMs shine is that I can ask a dumb question about this stuff, and can be pointed in the right direction pretty quickly. The implementation it spits out is often awful (if not unusable), but I can ask a question and it'll name drop the specific function and setting names that'll save me a lot of work. And from there, I know what to look up and it's a clear path from there.

And gamedev is a very strong case of not needing a correct solution. You just need things to feel right for most cases. Games that are rough around the edges have character. So LLM assistance for implementation (not art) can be handy.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#662

Post by siliconc0w »

Most codebases are pretty proprietary and so out of distribution for the AI which causes poor performance and you really have to fight some of the training to use internal libraries and conventions.

Still useful but certainly not PhD-level when it imports X, you remind it's instructions are to use Y, it apologizes, imports Y but then immediately imports X again.

So when your project gets cancelled for AI and haven't gotten a raise while AI researchers in the same company are getting generational wealth- it does feel pretty bad.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#663

Post by LTL_FTC »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #607
crystal_revenge wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've generally found an inverse correlation between "understands AI" and "exuberance for AI". I'm the only person at my current company who has had experience at multiple AI companies (the rest have never worked on it in a production environment, one of our projects is literally something I got paid to deliver customers at another startup), has written professionally about the topic, and worked directly with some big…

This completely explains why so many engineers are skeptical of AI while so many managers embrace it: The engineers are the ones who understand it. (BTW, if you're an engineer who thinks you don't understand AI or are not qualified to work on it, think again. It's just linear algebra, and linear algebra is not that hard. Once you spend a day studying it, you'll think "Is that all there is to it?" The only difficult p…

Linear algebra cannot be learned in a day. Maybe multiplying matrices when the dimensions allow but there is far more to linear algebra than knowing how to multiply matrices. Knowing when and why is far more interesting. Knowing how to decompose them. Knowing what a non-singular matrix is and why it’s special and so on. Once you know what’s found in a basic lower devision linear algebra class, one can move it linear programming and learn about cost functions and optimization or numerical analysis. PyTorch is just a calculator. If I handed someone a Ti-84 they wouldn’t magically know how to bust out statistics on it…

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#664

Post by int_19h »

ohyoutravel wrote: post #426
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.

I saw a post on Reddit the other day where the user was posting screenshots from ChatGPT about how they were using ChatGPT as a “Human OS” and outsourcing all decisions and information to ChatGPT. It made me queasy.

So basically Manna, but for your life?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#665

Post by int_19h »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #630
nikkwong wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It has improved drastically, as evident by the kinds of issues these things can do with minimal supervision now.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#666

Post by int_19h »

elzbardico wrote: post #613
LPisGood wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I think it’s pretty clear that software engineering is an “intelligence complete” problem. If you can automatically solve SWE than you can automatically solve pretty much all knowledge work.

A lot of modern corporate work is bullshit work. I don't think it is too outrageous to believe that LLMs can do a lot of what all those armies of corporate bureaucrats do.

The difference is that unlike SWEs, the people doing all that bullshit work are much better at networking, so they will (collectively) find a reason why they shouldn't be replaced with AI and push it through.

SWEs could do so as well, if only we were unionized.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#667

Post by heurist »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #654
adamisom wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I don't understand how LLMs work. I know some ML math and certainly could learn, and probably will, soon. But my opinions about what LLMs can do are based on... what LLMs can do. What I can see them doing. With my eyes. The right answer to the question "What can LLMs do?" is... looking... at what LLMs can do.

I'm sure you're already familiar with the ELIZA effect [0], but you should be a bit skeptical of what you are seeing with your eyes, especially when it comes to language. Humans have an incredible weakness to be tricked by language. You should be doubly skeptically ever since RLHF has become standard as the model has literally been optimized to give you answers you find most pleasing. The best way to measure of cours…

We get around this a bit when using it to write code since we have unit tests and can verify that it's making correct changes and adhering to an architecture. It has truly become much more capable in the last year. This technology is so flexible that it can be used in ways no eval will ever touch and still perform well. You can't just rely on what the labs say about it, you have to USE it.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#668

Post by MarkLowenstein »

According to demos, AI coding tools are allowing neophytes to instantly create working apps and websites with mere descriptions of what they want. According to devs, they're 10x as productive because certain time-consuming tasks are condensed like unit test writing, code reviews, and code refactors and clean-up. So we're to assume that in the age when the typical App Store offers a million apps we'll never be interested in, soon that number will be a billion.

In comes Wanderfugl. A tool for traveling that I will never need, where just trying to figure out what it does used more time than I wanted to spend on it. Now with AI, there will be several shiny new travel apps like Wanderfugl for you to learn and choose from literally every time you go on another vacation.

Wanderfugl may be wonderful, and an achievement. But the reaction of this Seattleite is "What's the point anymore?" This is why I am uninterested in the AI coding trend. It's just a part of a lot of new stuff I don't need.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#669

Post by didibus »

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…

> I mean, they've made all of the progress up to now in essentially the last 5 years

I have to challenge this one, the research on natural language generation and machine learning dates back to the 50s, it just it only recently came together at scale in a way that became useful, but tons of the hardest progress was made over many decades, and very little innovation happened in the last 5 years. The innovation has mostly been bigger scale, better data, minor architectural tweaks, and reinforcement learning with human feedback and other such fine tuning.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#670

Post by int_19h »

pnathan wrote: post #195
groos wrote: post #20

It's not just that AI is being pushed on to employees by the tech giants - this is true - but that the hype of AI as a life changing tech is not holding up and people within the industry can easily see this. The only life-changing thing it's doing is due to a self-fulfilling prophecy of eliminating jobs in the tech industry and outside by CEOs who have bet too much on AI. Everyone currently agrees that there is no re…

As a layoff justification and a hurryup tool, it is pretty loathesome. People use their jobs for their housing, food, etc.

> humans derive a lot of their self-evaluation as people from labor.

We're conditioned to do so, in large part because this kind of work ethic makes exploitation easier. Doesn't mean that's our natural state, or a desirable one for that matter.

"AI-based economy" is too broad a brush to be painting with. From the Marxist perspective, the question you should be asking is: who owns the robots? and who owns the wealth that they generate?

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