Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

941–950 of 1001 posts

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#941

Post by Slava_Propanei »

encyclopedism wrote: post #804
p0w3n3d wrote: post #752

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…

[dead]

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#942

Post by adastra22 »

4ggr0 wrote: post #908
adastra22 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t pronounce all the letters?

no. ever heard of silent letters?

I'm a native speaker of English, northern California dialect. I pronounce every one of those letters, to varying degrees. Some just affect the mouth shape by subtle amounts, but it is there.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#943

Post by vkou »

stickfigure wrote: post #901
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…

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…

Look, if you want the people to dig trenches with spoons, you can expect them to do it. But if all you're giving them is spoons, you're going to need to give them a lot of slack on the expected digging schedules.

Being forced to use a shit tool because , while your deadlines haven't been adjusted for all this wasted time is not acceptable behaviour. It's the kind of authoritarian horseshit that's that's so often pushed by unproductive parasites onto people who do actual work.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#944

Post by balamatom »

HacklesRaised wrote: post #926
indrora wrote: post #918

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think it's being compliant with the founder's vision entirely.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#946

Post by balamatom »

code_for_monkey wrote: post #854
wseqyrku wrote: post #847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant more about this part: > The threat to the environment, the consolidation of resources by the ones at the top, the spread of misinformation and lies, the acceleration of mass surveillance, the decay of critical thinking My question was that how many people are actually concerned about those things? If you think about it it's kind of obvious but it takes conscious effort to see it and I suspect not many people…

anecdotal but it seems many people are concerned about those things

I know, right? And very often I have the notion that that these things are obvious concerns for all sensible people. Except that lately I've been noticing how for some reason I only get that notion as long as I'm regularly consuming one information-containing product or another.

When I turn off my browser, video player, and ebook reader, outside it's a bit of a hellscape really, I really can't wait to get back online where people care about the real things, such as systemic collapse. But while I'm disconnected I do notice how the only thing that people seem to actually be enjoying right now are those self-same glass beads and plague blankets of Big Tech that we're dissing while trapped within them.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#947

Post by skx001 »

The industry will truly only find out how well AI adoption is going if it allows users both internal (employees, tech workers) and external (general users/consumers) to fully opt-out.

AI is being forced down peoples' throat. Millions want to but cannot disable Gemini from Gmail. Many SWEs don't want to use AI tools but managers are forcing them to do so.

How do you know if something is really liked/needed/wanted when there is no opt-out?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#948

Post by jitbit »

I don’t work at Microsoft and I have (almost) no friends there, but—

My team has relied on the Microsoft stack for over a decade (dotnet, GitHub Actions, VS Code, MS extensions), and I can say that the overall quality and “polish” of their releases has declined.

I try to help where I can—filing issues for outdated docs, contributing to dotnet/core, joining discussions about .NET 10 still not being available in Ubuntu APT feeds, reporting and helping resolve issues with MSSQL drivers and SqlClient on GitHub, etc.

But every time I interact with someone at Microsoft, I can’t help but read between the lines: they seem slightly demotivated by the company's shift toward an AI-first focus.

It's sad.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#949

Post by taurath »

sedawk wrote: post #917
stickfigure wrote: post #901

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is true, but is effective only if the dogfooders' feedback is accepted and worked upon. Which is not the case, I can tell you this from first-hand experience (currently work at Msft). Also unleashing and forcing tech savvy people to use immature tools is only asking for trouble when you don't have allocated enough manpower to deal with the fallout (that is, incessant downpour of improvement feedback). One cannot…

Not only are you discouraged from criticizing half baked manager-metric led implementations, you’re deeply incentivized to openly praise it if you want to be considered for the next well-funded initiative.

People with fiefdoms don’t like criticism. Microsoft pays their vassal dependent companies to use their products, no users actually like or would choose the products (Teams? 365 copilot? Azure?), and the whole enclosed ecosystem is pretty awful.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#950

Post by taurath »

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…

AI is busy quietly convincing every executive that uses it that they have no use for people to work out the details of their ideas anymore. It’s so frustrating to have these drive by executives come into a space you’re working in, drop in a 15 page deep think report they got from a 2 sentence prompt and call that contributing. Bonus points if the report is from an AI platform your company doesn’t have approved so you as a line employee can get written up for.
Post reply on HN