Earlier quoted context omitted.
> with the terse was and precision of my own thought Hehe. So much for precision ;)
Autocorrected “terse-ness”
Autocorrect is my nemesis. And I suspect it has teamed up with email address completion.
Everyone in Seattle hates AI
971–980 of 1001 posts
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#972Charlie, say it like it's fun: "Bing!"
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#973Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 encl…
Count me as that weird user that would choose Azure any second over AWS. The integration and interface stability they offer is simply better. Teams sucks indeed, but as I don't know any less-suck alternative I'll have to trust you, and the with Copilot I never bothered much so again can't tell.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#974Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're missing the point entirely. He's saying it's horses for courses, each tool has its use and you use the right tool for the job. And he's right. LLMs are fancy text query engines and work very well as such. The problem is when people try to shoehorn everything into LLMs. That's a disaster yet being perused vigorously by some.
I think the conflicting point you missed is that "right tool for the job" also implies "right tool". If you don't think that probabilistic output counts as "query response" then LLMs are the "wrong tool" for any text query engine. If a database engine returned the right answer only X% of the time, you would say the database engine is faulty and find another. LLMs are probabilistic algorithms that by their very nature…
For lots of jobs of “text querying” they do good enough of a job to be on par with humans (which are not infallible either).
And there are applications where you don’t have/wouldn’t pay another human, and the job that an AI does for mere cents is good enough most of the times. Like doing an analysis on a legacy codebase. I’ll read and verify, but running that “query” then saved me a lot of time.
Not everything needs to be deterministic to be of value.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#975"everyone"? Clickbait.
author doesn't like unpleasant truths and downvotes them
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#976Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the 90/90 rule comes into play. We all know Tom Cargill quote (even if we’ve never seen it attributed): The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. It feels like a gigantic win when it carves through that first 90%… like, “wow, I’m almost done and I just started!” . A…
The other problem is that if you didn't actually write the first 90% then the second 90% becomes 2x harder since you have to figure out wtf is actually going on.
Right— that’s bitten me ‘whipping up’ prototypes. My assumption about the way the LLM would handle done minutiae ends up being wrong and finding out why something isn’t working ends up taking more time than doing it right the first time by hand. The worst part about that is you can’t even factor it in to your already inaccurate work time estimates because it could strike anywhere — including things you’d never mess up yourself.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#977I 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…
> At the new place, perf doesn’t care if you use AI or not- just what you actually deliver
I work at Google, and I am of the overall opinion that it doesn't matter what you deliver from an engineering perspective. I've seen launches that changed some behavior from opt-in to opt-out get lauded as worth engineering-years of investment. I've seen demos that were 1-2 years ahead of our current product performance get buried under bureaucracy and nitpicking while the public product languishes with nearly no usage. The point being, what you objectively deliver doesn't matter, but what ends up mattering is how the people in your orbit weave the narrative about what you built.
So if "leadership" wants something concretely done, they must mandate it in such a way that cuts through all the spin that each layer of bureaucracy adds before presenting it to the next layer of bureaucracy. And "leadership" isn't a single person, so you might describe leaders as individual vectors in a vector space, and a clear eigenvector in this space of leadership decisions in many companies is the vector of "increase employee usage of AI tools".
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#978Those in power (such as those in the corporate managerial class) are trying to consolidate power by replacing humans with AI. There is the nice story of trying to improve overhead and increase efficiencies. There is also the ugly story of those in power trying to leverage AI for expert opinions even in the face of dissenting human experts.
For now, the human dissenters have a lot of leverage because AI still makes very clear and obvious errors sometimes, and it would be a political nightmare for a decision-maker to be accused of erring on the side of AI by recognized human experts who dissented. I wonder if there will come a time that AI opinion would be on par or even favored over the human expert because the human would be considered more fallible. This doesn't even have to be true - it only has to be sufficiently perceived to be sufficiently true.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#979Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
My impression is purely from a metrics perspective, people who were underperforming can really look like they are 3x as productive. AI is a real increase for them because it can do things they couldn't. It just gives them the ability to publish a thousand lines worth of PRs a day, which the regular and over performers have to review, but that shows up in THEIR metrics, not in the underperformer's metrics. If all you look at is metrics and KPIs and have no technical understanding, this looks amazing to you.
Most people I've worked with that were already some of the most productive before AI took off are still at the top, and AI didn't move the needle much for them. There's simply no way for them to do 3x the work.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#980Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of modern corporate work is bullshit work. I don't think it is too outrageous to believe that LLMs can do a lot of what all those armies of corporate bureaucrats do.
The difference is that unlike SWEs, the people doing all that bullshit work are much better at networking, so they will (collectively) find a reason why they shouldn't be replaced with AI and push it through. SWEs could do so as well, if only we were unionized.
Gotta agree that you have a point here, a pretty strong one indeed.