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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#71

Post by the_af »

mips_avatar wrote: post #2

Author here if anyone has thoughts

Out of curiosity, did you redact this with AI?

It has all the telltale signs: lots of em-dashes but also "punched up" paragraphs, a lot of them end with a zinger, e.g.

> Amazon folks are slightly more insulated, but not by much. The old Seattle deal—Amazon treats you poorly but pays you more—only masks the rot.

or

> Seattle has talent as good as anywhere. But in San Francisco, people still believe they can change the world—so sometimes they actually do.

Once or twice can be coincidence, but a full article of it reads a tiny bit like AI slop.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#72

Post by Fraterkes »

throwout4110 wrote: post #58
bccdee wrote: post #41

> Engineers don't try because they think they can't. This article assumes that AI is the centre of the universe, failing to understand that that assumption is exactly what's causing the attitude they're pointing to. There's a dichotomy in the software world between real products (which have customers and use cases and make money by giving people things they need) and hype products (which exist to get investors excite…

> There's a dichotomy in the software world between real products (which have customers and use cases and make money by giving people things they need) and hype products (which exist to get investors excited, so they'll fork over more money). AI is not both of these things? There are no real AI products that have real customers and make money by giving people what they need? > LLMs are a more substantive technology t…

A way to state this point that you may find less uncharitable is that a lot of current LLM applications are just very thin shells around ChatGPT and the like.

In those cases the actual "new" technology (ie, not the underlying ai necessarily) is not as substantive and novel (to me at least) as a product whose internals are not just an (existing) llm.

(And I do want to clarify that, to me personally, this tendency towards 'thin-shell' products is kind of an inherent flaw with the current state of ai. Having a very flexible llm with broad applications means that you can just put Chatgpt in a lot of stuff and have it more or less work. With the caveat that what you get is rarely a better UX than what you'd get if you'd just prompted an llm yourself.

When someone isn't using llms, in my experience you get more bespoke engineering. The results might not be better than an llm, but obviously that bespoke code is much more interesting to me as a fellow programmer)

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#73

Post by throwout4110 »

Fraterkes wrote: post #72
throwout4110 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a dichotomy in the software world between real products (which have customers and use cases and make money by giving people things they need) and hype products (which exist to get investors excited, so they'll fork over more money). AI is not both of these things? There are no real AI products that have real customers and make money by giving people what they need? > LLMs are a more substantive technology t…

A way to state this point that you may find less uncharitable is that a lot of current LLM applications are just very thin shells around ChatGPT and the like. In those cases the actual "new" technology (ie, not the underlying ai necessarily) is not as substantive and novel (to me at least) as a product whose internals are not just an (existing) llm. (And I do want to clarify that, to me personally, this tendency towa…

Yes ok then I definitely agree

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#74

Post by npunt »

cosmicgadget wrote: post #56
exmadscientist wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reads like it's AI-edited, which is deliciously ironic. (Protip: if you're going to use em—dashes—everywhere, either learn to use them appropriately, or be prepared to be blasted for AI—ification of your writing.)

Ironic? The author is working on an AI project.

The irony is that AI writing style is pretty off-putting, and the story itself was about people being put off by the author's AI project.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#75

Post by mips_avatar »

vunderba wrote: post #24

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.

I grew up in Norway and there's this idea in Europe of someone who breaks from corporate culture and hikes and camps a lot (called wandervogel in german). I also liked how when pronounced in Norwegian or Swedish it sounds like wander full. I like the idea of someone who is full of wander.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#76

Post by tptacek »

somekyle2 wrote: post #45
tptacek wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not at all my experience working in local government (that is, in close contact with everybody else paying attention to local government) that non-tech people hate AI. It seems rather the opposite.

I don't doubt that many love it. I'm just going based on SF non-tech people I know, who largely see it as the thing vaguely mentioned on every billboard and bus stop, the chatbot every tech company seems to be trying to wedge into every app, and the thing that makes misleading content on social media and enables cheating on school projects. But, sometimes it is good at summarizing videos and such. I probably have a b…

I can imagine reasons why non-tech people in SF would hate all tech. I work in tech and living in the middle of that was a big part of why I was in such a hurry to get out of there.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#77

Post by anthem2025 »

hectdev wrote: post #63
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…

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.

[dead]

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#78

Post by mips_avatar »

epolanski wrote: post #62
vunderba wrote: post #24

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.

It's pronounced wanderfull in Norwegian

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#79

Post by lateforwork »

I love AI but I find Microsoft AI to be mostly useless. You'd think that anything called Copilot can do things for you, but most of the time it just gives you text answers. Even when it is in the context of the application it can't give you better answers than ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity. What is the point of that?

Satya has completely wasted their early lead in AI. Google is now the leader.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#80

Post by lowbloodsugar »

The article reports Microsoft SDEs complaining about Copilot and being forced to use it. It's "worse than competitors' tools."

No shit. But that's hardly everyone is Seattle. I'd imagine people at Amazon aren't upset about being forced to use Copilot, or Google folks.

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