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I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

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Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#801
post #698

I think there's a reasonable argument that our entire society right now is under AI psychosis: The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. We're investing in datacenters at a scale that only makes sense if AI capabilities continue to advance to the point where they surpass most humans at most white collar tasks, if not reach superintelligence. And what are the possible outcomes? -…

My car drives itself. That's a $18T global market.

Also $1T in data center investment makes sense when you realize that companies are racing to create virtual white collar workers. Google spends $9B a year on software engineers.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#802
post #719
post #698

I think there's a reasonable argument that our entire society right now is under AI psychosis: The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. We're investing in datacenters at a scale that only makes sense if AI capabilities continue to advance to the point where they surpass most humans at most white collar tasks, if not reach superintelligence. And what are the possible outcomes? -…

Weird that you mention the stock market and then conclude that there are only two outcomes: bust or success. If anyone can learn anything from the stock market it's that boom and bust are cycles that oscillate around a trend and everything tends to revert toward longer term trajectories. So, yes everyone is caught up with and overhyping AI and yes there will be a bust after the boom at some indeterminate point but th…

Your comment and the parent comment are not in disagreement.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s funny I’ve been doing that too Trying to crank out all the tools I never had time to build because I think we’re going to get cut off eventually

May I ask what tools did you make so far? And what is on your roadmap?

Not OP, but I've been focusing on linting and automation.

Custom lint rules to encode best practices that previously relied on astute/alert code reviewer to call attention to. This is handy not just for humans but it steers the bots too. Or turning on some existing rule that required a big cleanup/migration to be compliant with. Now I just throw an LLM at it, since they're often laborious but mechanical changes. Which is the sweet spot for an LLM.

Also automating everything I can. That annoying release process that everyone hates but wasn't quite long/arduous enough to justify the time before? It's now automated. GitHub workflows for all the things.

This kind of stuff will forever be useful, even if the bottom drops out and the bubble bursts. And none of it is reliant on AI to run

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#804
post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Success is also bust: Money becomes worthless. Everything you know and are is now obselete.

If we are successful building an "ultra" human AI, it will require massive amounts of energy. That translates directly to "money". There will always be money unless someone finds a way to negate the second law of thermodynamics.

But if it replaces people that make money who’s paying for it. None of this makes any sense long term and no one has a plan for it.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#805
post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Success is also bust: Money becomes worthless. Everything you know and are is now obselete.

I highly doubt that. Humans might become obsolete, but money will almost certainly still be a thing.

Resources are finite though

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#806

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. You can use AI to code this way. I’ve successfully steered AI to implement good architecture by moving slowly and constantly course correcting

Yes but most people won’t.

Many teams did this before AI too. They start faster and end up with hard to refactor or extend code. For example, think of teams that don’t version their API /api/v1, that blocks a whole category of refactoring and extensions. Or teams that have random state transformation routes instead of following restful actions.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a junior dev there is this pressure to produce code, add features, and investigate bugs within unprecedented time period. I know whole code base is fking up but i will still add that feature or do a sloppy bug fix without digging deeper.

In my experience, AI really lowered the bar for bad code in the name of delivering faster. I have seen people write highly complex code where all the complexity was not necessary. Think: deep unnecessary branching, pointless error handling and retries which make no sense in our context, hand-coded parsing using regexps, haphazard data flow, functions which seem purely computational but slyly make API calls, pointless…

So many fallbacks. So many function_exists. So much pointless type casting. I swear it’s like the system prompt is designed to waste as many tokens as possible.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had to do a ton of SQL stuff lately, which I haven’t really worked with since the late 90s. ChatGPT has been a godsend, not just for me, but for our only coworker who knows SQL well, whom I’d probably be bugging several times a day at my wits’ end. But no one cares about those kinds of productivity gains. Just the ones that will completely replace us.

I'm always amazed by those comments. Why couldn't you buy a book on SQL[0], and spend a week on it? Or just go over to YouTube for a refresher? [0]: Like https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/sql-queries-for/9780134...

A book on .... SQL? What is this, the 1970s?

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#809
post #698

I think there's a reasonable argument that our entire society right now is under AI psychosis: The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. We're investing in datacenters at a scale that only makes sense if AI capabilities continue to advance to the point where they surpass most humans at most white collar tasks, if not reach superintelligence. And what are the possible outcomes? -…

My car drives itself. That's a $18T global market. Also $1T in data center investment makes sense when you realize that companies are racing to create virtual white collar workers. Google spends $9B a year on software engineers.

> My car drives itself. That's a $18T global market

Which will take decades to become addressable. Self-driving cars work OK in a few cities in one country. Expanding that to be able to cover Mumbai and Omsk and Nairobi will require significantly more work.

> Also $1T in data center investment makes sense when you realize that companies are racing to create virtual white collar workers.

Does it make sense? How much would the resulting virtual white collar worker cost? Because datacenters have running operational costs, and so do the people operating them and working on the software that runs in them.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, AI really lowered the bar for bad code in the name of delivering faster. I have seen people write highly complex code where all the complexity was not necessary. Think: deep unnecessary branching, pointless error handling and retries which make no sense in our context, hand-coded parsing using regexps, haphazard data flow, functions which seem purely computational but slyly make API calls, pointless…

> In my experience, AI really lowered the bar for bad code in the name of delivering faster. I would've believed that 6 months ago, but not now. If you have a good codebase with proper rails, hygiene and architecture, AI will produce better code than most engineers out there. People forget that 90% of the field has always been charlatans barely able to implement a fizz buzz or go much beyond trial and error googling.…

Forgive my ignorance, but if the corpus of coding data was always 90% bad, isn't that the same data being used for training LLMs? How are they magically any better than that average?
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