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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#921

Post by crote »

rvba wrote: post #861
Zoquento wrote: post #849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, having no summary can be more valuable than having a wrong summary.

The problem is that the wrong summary will be treated as the truth, as the original recording will of course have been deleted after a grace period. Oh, you're looking into a way to clean up hanging child processes spawned by your CI worker? Guess it's now on the record that "rvba mentions looking into the best way to kill his children without leaving a trace"! There's no way that could possibly be misinterpreted a few years down the line, right?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#922

Post by latexr »

r0m4n0 wrote: post #902
latexr wrote: post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What I feel is people are denouncing the problems and describing them as not being worth the tradeoff, not necessarily saying it has zero use cases. On the other end of the spectrum we have claims such as: > countless incredible use cases that are mind blowing, that you can use it ev…

Yea I do think you make a lot of valid points about the tradeoffs of the advances. I think anything we do to progress humanity technologically will have negative outcomes on everything else. I think as humans make things better for ourselves it will almost always rely on destroying something in nature in return. The capitalistic world we live in will almost always drive that to the extreme quickly. As for the other p…

> are the LLMs wrong sometimes, yes. But so are humans so it's not really a novel thing to point out.

The thing with humans is that you can build trust. I know exactly who to ask if I have a question about music, or medicine, or a myriad of other topics. I know those people will know the answers and be able to assess their level of confidence in them. If they don’t know, they can figure it out. If they are mistaken, they’ll come back and correct themselves without me having to do anything. Comparing LLMs to random humans is the wrong methodology.

> This is no different than another type of combustable engine that was created that has negative consequences on the environment in different ways.

Combustible engines don’t make it easy to spy on people, lie to them, and undermine trust in democracy.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#923

Post by nutjob2 »

throw-qqqqq wrote: post #294
mips_avatar wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same in Danish FWIW. In English, I’d pronounce it very similar to “wonderful”.

Are you a native speaker? Because said quickly in typical English it sounds like "wonderfukl" which isn't great.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#924

Post by crote »

hexator wrote: post #209
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…

Some people really do hate AI, it's not entirely about the layoffs. This is a well insulated bubble but you can find tons of anti-AI forums online.

I'd extend that to "very few people love AI".

In real life, I don't know anyone who genuinely wants to use AI. Most of them think it's "meh", but don't have any strong feelings about using it if it's more convenient - like Google shoving it in their face during a search. But would they pay for it, or miss it if it's gone? Nope, not a chance.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#925

Post by nateglims »

deaux wrote: post #594
nateglims wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I meant the anglosphere. But in most countries, the less people are aware of technology or use the internet the less they are enthusiastic about AI.

I don't see the correlation between technology/internet use and man-on-the-street attitudes towards AI. Compare Sweden with Japan.

Its a weak proxy for people who are not in tech.

In polling japan and sweden are very similar in terms of sentiment though: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-aro...

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#926

Post by HacklesRaised »

indrora wrote: post #918
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…

I too was at MSFT until the July layoffs. 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" discussion…

Is it AI, or is it being run by people entirely divorced from the founder's vision?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#927

Post by th0rine »

wseqyrku wrote: post #831
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…

Would you say there's at least fifty percent of people who are informed about these?

Yes.

Source: My ass.

Would it make their concerns less valid however if it wasn't?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#928

Post by crote »

senordevnyc wrote: post #244
averyvery wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, "Engineers don't try" is a frustrating statement. We've all tried generative AI, and there's not that much to it — you put text in, you get text back out. Some models are better at some tasks, some tools are better at finding the right text and connecting it to the right actions, some tools provide a better wrapper around the text-generation process. Certain jobs are very easy for AI to do, others are impossibl…

I’ve been an engineer for 20 years, for myself, small companies, and big tech, and now working for my own saas company. There are many valid critiques of AI, but “there’s not much there” isn’t one of them. To me, any software engineer who tries an LLM, shrugs and says “huh, that’s interesting” and then “gets back to work” is completely failing at their actual job, which is using technology to solve problems. Maybe AI…

> To me, any software engineer who tries an LLM, shrugs and says “huh, that’s interesting” and then “gets back to work” is completely failing at their actual job, which is using technology to solve problems.

To me, any software engineer who tries Haskell, shrugs and says “huh, that’s interesting” and then “gets back to work” is completely failing at their actual job, which is using technology to solve problems.

To me, any software engineer who tries Emacs, shrugs and says “huh, that’s interesting” and then “gets back to work” is completely failing at their actual job, which is using technology to solve problems.

To me, any software engineer who tries FreeBSD, shrugs and says “huh, that’s interesting” and then “gets back to work” is completely failing at their actual job, which is using technology to solve problems.

We're getting paid to solve the problem, not to play with the shiniest newest tools. If it gets the job done, it gets the job done.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#929

Post by nateglims »

sunaookami wrote: post #704
nateglims wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of tech, I think the opinion is generally negative. AI has lost a lot the narrative due to things like energy prices and layoffs.

ChatGPT is one of the most used websites in the world and it's used by the most normal people in the world, in what way is the opinion "generally negative"?

You can use ChatGPT for minor stuff and still have a negative view on AI. In fact the non-tech white collar workers I know use chatgpt for stuff like business writing at work but are generally concerned.

Negative sentiment also comes through in opinion polling in the US.

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