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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#861

Post by rvba »

Zoquento wrote: post #849
latexr wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This enhances my work. However other people seem to feel threatened. I wish people would stop spreading this as if it were the main reason. It’s a weak argument and disconnected from reality, like those people who think the only ones who dislike cryptocurrencies are the ones who didn’t become rich from it. There are plenty of reasons to be against the current crop of AI that have nothing to do with employment. The…

Don't forget the fact that most of the time, the AI tools don't actually work well enough to be worth the trouble. AI meeting notes are great! After you spend twice as long editing out the errors, figuring out which of the two Daves was talking each time, and removing all the unimportant side-items that were captured in the same level of detail as the core decision. AI summaries are great - if you're the sort of pers…

AI summaries are great for orgs that dont do them (AI better than nothing) but not that great for those orgs that have an agenda and a note taker. What is very rare. Bur better quality

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#862

Post by rtp4me »

ACCount37 wrote: post #795
kahnclusions wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the absolute trash I usually get out of ChatGPT, Claude, etc, I wouldn’t say that it writes “working” code.

By that metric: do you? Seeing an AI casually spit out an 800 lines script that works first try is really fucking humbling to me, because I know I wouldn't be able to do that myself. Sure, it's an area of AI advantage, and I still crush AI in complex codebases or embedded code. But AI is not strictly worse than me, clearly. The fact that it already has this area of advantage should give you a pause.

Humbling indeed. I am utterly amazed at Claude's breadth of knowledge and ability to understand the context of our conversations. Even if I misspell words, don't use the exact phrase, or call something a function instead of a thread, Claude understands what I want and helps make it happen. Not to mention the ability to read hundreds of lines of debug output and point out a tiny error that caused the bug.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#863

Post by NoGravitas »

conartist6 wrote: post #818
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…

Why would you not hate AI. What is there to like. It's the closing trash compactor of soullessness and hate of the human, described vividly as having affected Microsoft culture as thoroughly as intergranular corrosion can turn a solid block of aluminum to dust. Fuck Microsoft for both hating me and hating their own people. Fuck. That. Shit.

> It's the closing trash compactor of soullessness and hate of the human, described vividly as having affected Microsoft culture as thoroughly as intergranular corrosion can turn a solid block of aluminum to dust.

That's a great way to describe it. There's a good article that points out AI is the new aesthetic of fascism. And, of course, in Miyazaki's words, "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself."

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#864

Post by parineum »

pier25 wrote: post #837
parineum wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What about the RAM price surge? What about diverting funding from much more useful and needed things? What about automation of scams, surveillance, etc? I can keep going. There are plenty of reasons to hate on AI beyond hype.

> What about the RAM price surge?

It's a bit more expensive. It's not the end of the world. Production will likely increase if the demand is consistent.

> What about diverting funding from much more useful and needed things?

And who determines that? People put there money where they want to. People think AI will provide value to other people and those people will, therefore, pay money for AI. So the funding that AI is receiving is directly proportional to how useful and needed people think AI is. I disagree, but I'm not a dictator.

> What about automation of scams, surveillance, etc?

Technology makes things easier, including bad things. This isn't the first time this happened and it won't be the last. It also makes avoiding those things easier though but that usually lags a bit behind.

> I can keep going.

Please do because it seems like you're grasping at straws.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#865

Post by zeristor »

mlavrent wrote: post #819

I was at Microsoft until July of this year until I left for an SF-based company (not AI though). The difference between the two with regards to AI tool usage couldn’t be more different- at Microsoft, they had started penalizing you in perf if you didn’t use the AI tools, which often were under par and you didn’t have a choice in. At the new place, perf doesn’t care if you use AI or not- just what you actually deliver…

Perhaps the managers performance goals are linked to take up, this sometimes happens and it all becomes too blunt.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#866

Post by pseudalopex »

kevin948 wrote: post #598
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…

This has been exactly my mindset as well (another Seattle SWE/DS). The baseline capability has been improving and compounding, not getting worse. It'd actually be quite convenient if AI's capabilities stayed exactly where they are now; the real problems come if AI does work. I'm extremely skeptical of the argument that this will end up creating jobs just like other technological advances did. I'm sure that will happe…

> I'm extremely skeptical of the argument that this will end up creating jobs just like other technological advances did. I'm sure that will happen around the edges, but this is the first time thinking itself is being commodified, even if it's rudimentary in its current state. It feels very different from automating physical labor: most folks don't dream of working on an assembly line.

Most people do not dream of working most white collar jobs. Many people dream of meaningful physical labor. And many people who worked in mines did not dream of being told to learn to code.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#868

Post by shepardrtc »

ozfive wrote: post #739
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…

The layoffs are due to tax incentives in the tax cut bills that financially incentivize offshoring work.

That makes sense. And its even worse of a reason. At least for people living in the US.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#869

Post by pseudalopex »

malfist wrote: post #652
josephg wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yeah. And because when an expert looks at the code chatgpt produces, the flaws are more obvious. It programs with the skill of the median programmer on GitHub. For beginners and people who do cookie cutter work, this can be incredible because it writes the same or better code they could write, fast and for free. But for experts, the code it produces is consistently worse than what we can do. At best my pride dem…

By volume the vast majority of code on github is students. Think about that when you average github for ai

> By volume the vast majority of code on github is students.

Who determined this? How?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#870

Post by pseudalopex »

rprend wrote: post #840
xwolfi wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Claude cannot code at all, it's gonna shit the bed and it learns only on human coders to be able to even know an example is a solution rather than a malware...

Every greenfield project uses claude code to write 90+% of code. Every YC startup for the past six months says AI writes 90+% of their code. Claude code writes 90+% of my code. That’s today. It works great. I have a faster iteration cycle. For existing large codebases, AI modifications will continue to be okay-ish. But new companies with a faster iteration cycle will outcompete olds ones, and so in the long run most…

> Every greenfield project uses claude code to write 90+% of code.

Who determined this? How?

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