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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#941

Post by knallfrosch »

pera wrote: post #800

It's fascinating how over the past year we have had almost daily posts like this one, yet from the outside everything looks exactly the same, isn't that very weird? Why haven't we seen an explosion of new start-ups, products or features? Why do we still see hundreds of bug tickets on every issue tracking page? Have you noticed anything different on any changelog? I invite tptacek, or any other chatbot enthusiast arou…

> Why haven't we seen an explosion of new start-ups, products or features? Why do we still see hundreds of bug tickets on every issue tracking page? Have you noticed anything different on any changelog?

In my personal experience (LLM and code suggestion only) it's because I use LLMs to code unimportant stuff. Actually thinking what I want to do with the business code is exhausting and I'd rather play a little with a fun project. Also, the unit tests that LLMs can now write (and which were too expensive to write myself) were never important to begin with.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#942

Post by deboredguy »

flkiwi wrote: post #932

I tend to agree with the gist of this, namely that the change is here and "AI" presents some huge potential to save me from having to do the tedious stuff. But we do need a bit of a sanity check. I'm in the middle of trying to convince any of the AIs that I have access to to write me some simple Lua. Specifically, I'm trying to write a query that returns a certain subset of pages from the Silverbullet V2 note tool. T…

[dead]

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#943

Post by beloch »

matthewsinclair wrote: post #691

I think this article is pretty spot on — it articulates something I’ve come to appreciate about LLM-assisted coding over the past few months. I started out very sceptical. When Claude Code landed, I got completely seduced — borderline addicted, slot machine-style — by what initially felt like a superpower. Then I actually read the code. It was shockingly bad. I swung back hard to my earlier scepticism, probably even…

LLM's are self-limiting, rather than self-reinforcing, and that's the big reason why they're not the thing, both good or bad, that some people think they are.

"Garbage in, garbage out", is still the rule for LLM's. If you don't spend billions training them or if you let them feed on their own tail too much they produce nonsense. e.g. Some LLM's currently produce better general search results than google. This is mainly a product of many billions being spent on expert trainers for those LLM's, while google neglects (or actively enshitifies) their search algorithms shamefully. It's humans, not LLM's, producing these results. How good will LLM's be at search once the money has moved somewhere else and neglect sets in?

LLM's aren't going to take everyone's jobs and trigger a singularity precisely because they fall apart if they try to feed on their own output. They need human input at every stage. They are going to take some people's jobs and create new ones for others, although it will probably be more of the former than the latter, or billionaires wouldn't be betting on them.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#944

Post by knallfrosch »

TheRoque wrote: post #185

One of the biggest anti LLM arguments for me at the moments is about security. In case you don't know, if you open a file with copilot active or cursor, containing secrets, it might be sent to a server a thus get leaked. The companies say that if that file is in a cursorignore file, it won't be indexed, but it's still a critical security issue IMO. We all know what happened with the "smart home assistants" like Alexa…

It's pretty unlikely someone at Cursor cares about accessing your Spring Boot project on GitHub through your personal access token – because they already have all your code.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#945

Post by nancyminusone »

Title nitpick: The amount is people who care about AI for coding assistance is a relative minority. For everyone else, there's 'AI', which has a huge branding problem. 'AI' is filling all search results with trash, and creating trash websites full of trash to fill up the rest of the search results. It's generating trash images to put at the top of every blog post. It's eating up all the server load with scraping. It's what's been fooling my dad every day on Facebook.

When people are sick of AI, this is what they are talking about. AI hype people ignore this perspective each and every time.

It doesn't matter how great your paper Mill's paper is, if you're dumping PCBs in the river, people are going to quite rightly get pissed off.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#946

Post by rsanheim »

cesarb wrote: post #312

This article does not touch on the thing which worries me the most with respect to LLMs: the dependence . Unless you can run the LLM locally, on a computer you own, you are now completely dependent on a remote centralized system to do your work. Whoever controls that system can arbitrarily raise the prices, subtly manipulate the outputs, store and do anything they want with the inputs, or even suddenly cease to opera…

We will have the equivalent of Claude Sonnet 4 in a local LLM that can run well on a modern Mac w/ 36+ GB of ram in a year or two. Maybe faster. The local/open models are developing very fast in terms of quantization and how well they can run on consumer hardware.

Folks that are local LLMs everyday now will probably say you can basically emulate at least Sonnet 3.7 for coding if you have an real AI workstation. Which may be true, but the time and effort and cost involved is substantial.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#947

Post by spacechild1 »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #71

This happened with the introduction of smartphones too. Every slashdot post had a haughty and upvoted ‘why would i want such a thing!!!’. It was obviously huge. You could see it taking off. Yet a lot of people proudly displayed ignorance and backed each other up on it to the point that discussion around the topic was often drowned out by the opposition to change. Now today it takes minutes of playing with ai coding a…

> This happened with the introduction of smartphones too. Every slashdot post had a haughty and upvoted ‘why would i want such a thing!!!’.

This is a funny example because the devastating effects of smartphone addiction on society are now blatantly obvious. There are in fact very good reasons for not 'wanting such a thing'.

Don't get me wrong, LLMs can be incredibly useful and I think they deserve some of the current hype. Claiming that LLMs are useless is indeed silly and can be rightfully ignored. But there are serious concerns about potentional (or actual) negative effects on society, and these should be taken seriously.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#948

Post by lubujackson »

Fredkin wrote: post #793

My main concern is not even mentioned in this article and there are hardly any comments here addressing it: Privacy / allowing 3rd parties to read and potentially train on your proprietary source code. I've used LLMs to crank out code for tedious things (like generating C-APIs and calling into poorly documented libraries) but I'm not letting them touch my code until I can run it 100% locally offline. Would love to us…

Cursor has "privacy mode" in Pro mode that supposedly prevents training on your code.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#949

Post by lubujackson »

stavros wrote: post #506

I love LLMs, and I really like programming with Cursor, but I never managed to get the "agents with tons of stuff in their context" mode to work for me. I use Cursor like a glorified code completer, 4-5 lines at a time, because otherwise the LLM just makes too many mistakes that compound. If you let it run in the "write my code for me" mode, and ask it to fix some mistake it made, it will always add more code, never…

Make sure you include lots of files of context (including any type definitions!) After a big change before approving any code ask it: "Is this the simplest and cleanest approach?" Usually it will make more revisions and actually produce clean code then. You can also say that in the original prompt, or specify the structure of the change you want it to make.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#950

Post by peab »

cesarb wrote: post #312

This article does not touch on the thing which worries me the most with respect to LLMs: the dependence . Unless you can run the LLM locally, on a computer you own, you are now completely dependent on a remote centralized system to do your work. Whoever controls that system can arbitrarily raise the prices, subtly manipulate the outputs, store and do anything they want with the inputs, or even suddenly cease to opera…

do you use GitHub? Vs code? GCP or AWS? The internet, perhaps?All work is dependent on other services, that's the modern world
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