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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#961

Post by nutjob2 »

r0m4n0 wrote: post #896
nutjob2 wrote: post #887

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm mostly saying the hype is real on a lot of things today. Is it working perfectly for everything? Definitely not, but I'm of the opinion giving it another 10 years and it just might be. I'm amongst the many working to make it better and all I see is a million possibilities of what can be done that we have only worked through a few of the issues. Did it change EVERYTHING over night? No, it was a big breakthrough, t…

Hype along the lines of people not having work anymore and that "AGI" is around the corner, etc are real?

Yes strong AI is always about 10 years off.

But yes any new tech takes time to work itself out. No question that LLMs are useful but they will wildly under-deliver by current hype standards. They have their own strengths and weaknesses like everything, but they can be very misleading, thus the hype.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#962

Post by abustamam »

runarberg wrote: post #960
rng-concern wrote: post #899

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is part of it, but the bigger part for me is, art is an expression of human emotion. When I hear music, I am part of those artists journey, struggles. The emotion in their songs come from their first break-up, an argument they had with someone they loved. I can understand that on a profound, shared level. Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperatively against the AI. Until one…

I am curious how your GP feels about art forgery. I can personally see my self enjoying a piece of art only to find out it was basically copied from a different artist, and then be totally put off by the experience, totally unable to enjoy that stolen piece of art ever again.

I think context is important though. If someone pays for an original and it ends up being a forgery then yeah that's terrible and the purchaser was scammed. There is no similar concept to art online because it's all just pixels, unless you buy into the concept of NFTs as art ownership (I don't). Someone who steals someone else's online art and claims authorship would be the closest analogy to forgery, I suppose, but the aim of forgery is to sell it as the original author's work, not as the work of the thief's. But if I did find out thay an image of an artist I liked was indeed drawn by someone else, I'd try to find a way to support that someone else. It doesn't make me enjoy the art any less.

Of course knowing the provenance of something you enjoy, and learning that it has dark roots, can certainly tarnish your enjoyment of said thing, like knowing where your diamonds came from, or how sausage is made. It's hard to make a similar connection to AI generated stuff.

I listen to a lot of EDM. Some of the tracks on my playlist are almost certainly AI generated. If I like a song and check out the artist and find that it's a bot then I'm disappointed because that means I can never see them live, but I can still bop my head to the beat.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#963

Post by p0w3n3d »

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…

> I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes

You're absolutely right, this is another face of this AI coin... We people are taught to do things and love doing them and we're scared it's going to be taken away from us. This is what I thought when writing about the man who cancelled CS course. He apparently predicted that learning algorithms solving won't make him happy because AI will do it for him

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#964

Post by pjmlp »

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…

In 2025, C++ Builder is still better than Visual C++, in what concerns doing Windows GUI development in C++, some things never change, and management keeps being blind to them.

Regarding dog fooding, Project Reunion was also a victim of all engines AI, now the damage is done and only the Windows team cares, because their job depends on using it.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#965

Post by pjmlp »

capr wrote: post #914
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…

Maybe if they would've let their engineers use Borland C++ they would've learned a thing or two for their own product.

I keep telling to the WinUI marketing team that instead of talking about how "great" doing XAML C++ is, they should actually buy a copy of C++ Builder.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#966

Post by pjmlp »

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…

From the outside this is clearly visible how Project Reunion crashed, C++/WinRT went into maintenance, VC++ losing steam to ISO compliance after bosting about C++20 and C11/17, .NET focus on Aspire/Blazor all AI in detriment of the rest,....

Thankfully I am technology mercenary, polyglot, and use whatever the clients need, regardless of my point of view, but it is sad to see the human part behind those decisions being affected.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#967

Post by yetihehe »

roncesvalles wrote: post #954
encyclopedism wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't think that's the reason either. AI is just not that good. If it really made me more productive, why wouldn't I use it all the time? I'd get everything done before lunch and go home. Or I'd use it all day to do the work of 3 people and be on the fast track to promotions. The problem is simply that it gets in the way. For things I know nothing about, AI is excellent. For things that I'm good at and have literal…

> Or I'd use it all day to do the work of 3 people and be on the fast track to promotions.

Or, like execs want, you do work of 3 people, so we can fire two and get the bonus, plus maybe a 5% pay increase for you. "If someone is good at digging, give him a bigger shovel".

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#968

Post by lazystar »

toast0 wrote: post #825
lazystar wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

speaking of caves... I just picked up an old gamecube. it's refreshing to play purely offline content from an age without any AI art of any kind. some games, like animal crossing, will break in 2031 though, so there's only a good 5 more years left to enjoy it.

Well, the Gamecube is probably fine, but the Dreamcast was thinking, so watch out :P I know Animal Crossing is sensitive to the RTC, but could you set the clock back 28 years and go from there? You'll have the same days of the week and what not, just the year number will be wrong.

yeah, been thinking about that... but itd feel kinda weird. my village (named Seattle, funny enough) is ~20 years old, and has both mine and my younger brother's characters. Whatever I decide to do with it in 2031, it'll feel like an ending.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#969

Post by throw-qqqqq »

nutjob2 wrote: post #923
throw-qqqqq wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not a native English speaker, no.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#970

Post by andrei_says_ »

jacquesm wrote: post #808
andrei_says_ wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dismissal I think indicates exhaustion from the additional work I’d need to do to make an LLM write my code, annoyance at its inaccuracies, and disgust at the massive scam and grift that is the LLM influencers. Writing code via a LLM feels like writing with a wet noodle. It’s much faster and write what I mean, myself, with the terse was and precision of my own thought.

> with the terse was and precision of my own thought Hehe. So much for precision ;)

Autocorrected “terse-ness”
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