911–920 of 1001 posts
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You have a very cartoon villain image of tech workers in your head. While Tesla-driving libertarian techbros are certainly a thing, this doesn't even accurately represent the majority of employees in Big Tech, nevermind the industry as a whole.
What impression do you think non-tech workers have of tech workers, these days.
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>morality of the creation of AI tooling aside, That's a big aside >Like, they'd enjoy a song, or an image, or a book, and then suddenly when they find out it's AI suddenly they hate it. Yes, because for some people its about supporting human creation. Finding out it's part of a grift to take from said humans can be infuriating. People don't want to be a part of that.
if I learn music had an AI involved it actually makes me feel awful. It totally just strips it of any appeal for me.
I feel like there is an absurd amount of negative rhetoric about how AI doesn't have any real world use cases in this comment thread. I do believe that the product leadership is shoehorning it into every nook and cranny of the world right now and there are reasons to be annoyed by that but there are also countless incredible use cases that are mind blowing, that you can use it every day for. I need to write about som…
Its not about the tech, the negativity is due to the mismatch between hype and reality. LLMs are incredibly useful, for certain things, like the ones you have found. Others simply don't work. Is it going to deliver on even 1% of the hype any time soon? Unlikely.
I think our tooling is holding us back more than the actual models, and even if they never advance at all from here (unlikely), we'll still get years of improvement and innovation.
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…
Microsoft is forcing the company to dogfood their own tools. They do this because they need the feedback so they can improve their tools, and they think these tools are a critical part of their future. Presumably your new company isn't building AI tools, so they don't care what you use. Imagine a developer in 1990s Microsoft saying "I want to use Borland C++ because it's better than the Microsoft IDE". Maybe it is, m…
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Sorry but your SQL comparison is way off. SQL is deterministic, has a defined implementation that databases must follow and when you run a statement it presents a query plan. This is the absolute opposite to using an LLM. Please stop using this comparison and perhaps look for others, like for example, a randomised search engine.
hear me out though: What if every time you used an sql query it made a bunch of stuff up? 80% of the time its what you want but sometimes it just imagines data and pulls it out of its butt
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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, and it's only going to improve from here. I sure hope so. But until the hallucination problem is solved, there's still going to be a lot of toxic waste generated. We have got to get AI systems which know when they don't know something and don't try to fake it.
> there's still going to be a lot of toxic waste generated.
And how are LLMs going to get better as the quality of the training data nosedives because of this? Model collapse is a thing. You can easily see a scenario how they'll never be better than they are now.
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…
Microsoft is forcing the company to dogfood their own tools. They do this because they need the feedback so they can improve their tools, and they think these tools are a critical part of their future. Presumably your new company isn't building AI tools, so they don't care what you use. Imagine a developer in 1990s Microsoft saying "I want to use Borland C++ because it's better than the Microsoft IDE". Maybe it is, m…
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…
Hang around old Microsofties and you'll encounter a phrase: "The Deal." The Deal is this informal agreement: Microsoft doesn't pay amazingly but you're given the time to have work-life balance, you can be relatively assured that upper leadership gives a shit about the ICs, there's space for "... So I was thinking..." to become real "... and that's our next product" discussions and that it's okay to fall so long as you can get back up and keep walking afterwards.
The Deal is dead.
People fired for performance after a bad review their manager didn't give them. The constant slimming of orgs and the relentless gnawing at budgets. I watched as a team went from reasonable to gutted because it got the short straw in "unregretted attrition quotas"
AI is driving this, and I want to see the chat logs between executives and copilot. What sycophantic shit is it producing that is driving them to make horrible decisions?
Someone wrote on HN the (IMO) main reason why people do not accept AI. AI is about centralisation of power So basically, only a few companies that hold on the large models will have all the knowledge required to do things, and will lend you your computer collecting monthly fees. Also see https://be-clippy.com/ for more arguments (like Adobe moving to cloud to teach their model on your work). For me AI is just a natur…
> AI is about centralisation of power I do not believe this is the main reason at all. The core issue is that AI is taking away, or will take away, or threatens to take away, experiences and activities that humans would WANT to do. Things that give them meaning and many of these are tied to earning money and producing value for doing just that thing. As someone said "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I ca…
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> 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, on the other hand? Seems like we're mostly getting cancer.