How stupid do you have to be to believe that only 8% of companies have seen failed AI projects? We can’t manage this consistently with CRUD apps and people think that this number isn’t laughable? Some companies have seen benefits during the LLM craze, but not 92% of them. 34% of companies report that generative AI specifically has been assisting with strategic decision making? What the actual fuck are you talking about?
…
I don’t believe you. No one with a brain believes you, and if your board believes what you just wrote on the survey then they should fire you.
I had my fun with Copilot before I decided that it was making me stupider - it’s impressive, but not actually suitable for anything more than churning out boilerplate.
This. Many of these tools are good at incredibly basic boilerplate that’s just a hint outside of say a wizard. But to hear some of these AI grifters talk, this stuff is going to render programmers obsolete.
There’s a reality to these tools. That reality is they’re helpful at times, but they are hardly transformative at the levels the grifters go on about.
I use them like wikipedia: it’s a good starting point and that’s it (and this comparison is a disservice to wikipedia).
Yep! It’s a good way to get over the fear of a blank page, but I don’t trust it for more than outlines or summaries
Man, I need to build some new shit.
I can’t remember the last time I looked at a blank page.
Blank pages are for the young
I wouldn’t even trust it for summaries beyond extremely basic stuff.
I agree with your parenthetical, but Wikipedia actually agrees on your main point: Wikipedia itself is not a source of truth.
I interviewed a candidate for a senior role, and they asked if they could use AI tools. I told them to use whatever they normally would, I only care that they get a working answer and that they can explain the code to me.
The problem was fairly basic, something like randomly generate two points and find the distance between them, and we had given them the details (e.g. distance is a straight line). They used AI, which went well until it generated the Manhattan distance instead of the Pythagorean theorem. They didn’t correct it, so we pointed it out and gave them the equation (totally fine, most people forget it under pressure). Anyway, they refactored the code and used AI again to make the same mistake, didn’t catch it, and we ended up pointing it out again.
Anyway, at the end of the challenge, we asked them how confident they felt about the code and what they’d need to do to feel more confident (nudge toward unit testing). They said their code was 100% correct and they’d be ready to ship it.
They didn’t pass the interview.
And that’s generally my opinion about AI in general, it’s probably making you stupider.
I’ve seen people defend using AI this way by comparing it to using a calculator in a math class, i.e. if the technology knows it, I don’t need to.
And I feel like, for the kind of people whose grasp of technology, knowledge, and education are so juvenile that they would believe such a thing, AI isn’t making them dumber. They were already dumb. What the AI does is make code they don’t understand more accessible, which is to say, it’s just enabling dumb people to be more dangerous while instilling them with an unearned confidence that only compounds the danger.
Spot on description
Yup. And I’m unwilling to be the QC in a coding assembly line, I want competent peers who catch things before I do.
But my point isn’t that AI actively makes individuals dumber, it’s making people in general dumber. I believe that to be true about a lot of technology. In the 80s, people were familiar with command-line interfaces, and jumping to some coding wasn’t a huge leap, but today, people can’t figure out how to do a thing unless there’s an app for it. AI is just the next step along that path, soon, even traditionally competent industries will be little more than QC and nobody will remember how the sausage is made.
If they can demonstrate that they know how the sausage is made and how to inspect a sausage of packages, I’m fine with it. But if they struggle to even open the sausage package, we’re going to have problems.
Yeah, I honestly don’t have any real issue with using it to accelerate your workflow. I think it’s hit or miss how much it does, but it’s probably slightly stepped up from code completion without “AI”.
But if you don’t understand every line of code “you” write completely, you’re being grossly negligent and begging for a shitshow.
Similar story, I had a junior dev put in a PR for SQL that gets lat and long and gives back distance. The request was using the Haversine formula but was using the km coefficient, rather than the one for miles.
I asked where they got it and they indicated AI. I sighed and pointed out why it was wrong and that we had PostGIS and that’s there is literally scalar functions available that will do the calculations way faster and they should use those.
There’s a clear over reliance on code generation. That said, it’s pretty good for things that I can eye scan and verify that’s what I would have typed anyway. But I’ve found it suggesting things I wouldn’t remotely permit to things that are “sort of” correct. I’ll let it pop on the latter case and go back and clean it up. But yeah, anyone blind trusting AI shouldn’t be allowed to make final commits.
I just don’t bother, under the assumption that I’ll spend more time correcting the mistakes than actually writing the code myself. Maybe that’s faulty, as I haven’t tried it myself (mostly because it’s hard to turn on in my editor, vim).
Maybe that’s faulty, as I haven’t tried it myself
Nah perfectly fine take. Each their own I say. I would absolutely say that where it is, not bothering with it is completely fine. You aren’t missing all that much really. At the end of the day it might have saved me ten-fifteen minutes here and there. Nothing that’s a tectonic shift in productivity.
Yeah, most of my dev time is spent reading, and I’m a pretty fast typist, so I never bothered.
Maybe I’ll try it eventually. But my boss isn’t a fan anyway, so I’m in no hurry.
It can be useful in explaining concepts you’re unsure about, in regards to the reading part, but you should always verify that information.
But it has helped me understand certain concepts in the past, where I struggled with finding good explanations using a search engine.
Ah, ok. I’m pretty good with concepts (been a dev for 15-ish years), I’m usually searching for specific API usage or syntax, and the official docs are more reliable anyway. So the biggest win would probably be codegen, but that’s also a relatively small part of my job, which is mostly code reviews and planning.
it’s pretty good for things that I can eye scan and verify that’s what I would have typed anyway. But I’ve found it suggesting things I wouldn’t remotely permit to things that are “sort of” correct.
Yeah. I haven’t bothered with it much but the best use I can see of it is just rubber ducking.
Last time I used it was to asked how to change contrast in a numpy image. It said to multiply each channel by contrast. (I don’t even think this is right and it should be
((original value-128) * contrast) + 128)notoriginal value * contrastas it suggested), but it did remind me I can just run operations on colour channels.Wait what’s my point again? Oh yeah, don’t trust anyone that can’t tell you what the output is supposed to do.
Wait wait wait so… this person forgot the pythagorean theorem?
Like that is the most basic task. It’s
d = sqrt((x1 - x2)^2 + (y1 - y2)^2), right?That was off the top of my head, this person didn’t understand that? Do I get a job now?
I have seen a lot of programmers talk about how much time it saves them. It’s entirely possible it makes them very fast at making garbage code. One thing I’ve known for a long time is that understanding code is much harder than writing it, and so asking an LLM to generate your code sounds like it’s just creating harder work for you, unless you don’t care about getting it right.
Yup, you’re hired as whatever position you want. :)
Our instructions were basically:
- randomly place N coordinates on a 2D grid, and a random target point
- report the closest of those N coordinates to the target point
It was technically different (we phrased it as a top-down game, but same gist). AI generated manhattan distance (
abs(x2 - x1) + abs(x2 - x1)) probably due to other clues in the text, but the instructions were clear. The candidate didn’t notice what it was doing, we pointed it out, then they asked for the algorithm, which we provided.Our better candidates remember the equation like you did. But we don’t require it, since not all applicants finished college (this one did). We’re more concerned about code structure, asking proper questions, and software design process, but math knowledge is cool too (we do a bit of that).
College? Pythagorean Theorem is mid-level high school math.
I did once talk to a high school math teacher about a graphics program I was hacking away on at the time, and she was surprised that I actually use the stuff she teaches. Which is to say that I wouldn’t expect most programmers to know it exactly off the top of their head, but I would expect they’ve been exposed to it and can look it up if needed. I happen to have it pretty well ingrained in my brain.
Yes, you learn it in the context of finding the hypotenuse of a triangle, but:
- a lot of people are “bad” at math (more unconfident), but good with logic
- geometry, trig, etc require a lot of memorization, so it’s easy to forget things
- interviews are stressful, and good applicants will space on basic things
So when I’m interviewing, I try to provide things like algorithms that they probably know but are likely to space on, and focus on the part I care about: can they reason their way through a problem and produce working code, and then turn around and review their code. Programming is mostly googling stuff (APIs, algorithms, etc), I want to know if they can google the right stuff.
And yeah, we let applicants look stuff up, we just short circuit the less important stuff so they have time to show us the important parts. We dedicate 20-30 min to coding (up to an hour if they rocked at questions and are struggling on code), and we expect a working solution and for them to ask questions about vague requirements. It’s a software engineering test, not a math test.
Yeah, that’s absolutely fair, and it’s a bit snobby of me to get all up in arms about forgetting a formula - although it is high school level where I live. But to be handed the formula, informed that there’s an issue and still not fix it is the really hard part to wrap my head around, given it’s such a basic formula.
I guess I’m also remembering someone I knew who got a programming job off the back of someone else’s portfolio, who absolutely couldn’t program to save their life and revealed that to me in a glaring way when I was trying to help them out. It just makes me think of that study that was done that suggested that there might be a “programmer brain” that you either have or you don’t. They ended up costing that company a lot to my knowledge.
I don’t want to believe that coders like these exist and are this confident in an AI’s ability to code.
My co-worker said told me another story.
His friend was in a programming class, and made it nearly to the end, when he asked my friend for help. Basically, he had already written the solution, but it wasn’t working, and he needed help debugging it. My friend looked at the code, and it looked AI generated because there were obvious mistakes throughout, so he asked his friend to walk him through the code, and that’s when his friend admitted to AI generating the whole thing. My friend refused to help.
They do exist, but this candidate wasn’t that. I think they were just under pressure and didn’t know the issue. The red flag for me wasn’t AI or not catching the AI issues, it was that when I asked how confident they were about the code (after us catching the same bug twice), they said 100% and they didn’t need any extra assurance (I would’ve wanted to write tests).
Copilot / LLM code completion feels like having a somewhat intelligent helper who can think faster than I can, however they have no understanding of how to actually code, but are good at mimicry.
So it’s helpful for saving time typing some stuff, and sometimes the absolutely weird suggestions make me think of other scenarios I should consider, but it’s not going to do the job itself.
So it’s helpful for saving time typing some stuff
Legitimately, this is the only use I found for it. If I need something extremely simple, and feeling too lazy to type it all out, it’ll do the bulk of it, and then I just go through and edit out all little mistakes.
And what gets me is that anytime I read all of the AI wank about how people are using these things, it kind of just feels like they’re leaving out the part where they have to edit the output too.
At the end of the day, we’ve had this technology for a while, it’s just been in the form of predictive suggestions on a keyboard app or code editor. You still had to steer in the right direction. Now it’s just smart enough to make it from start to finish without going off a cliff, but you still have to go back and fix it, the same way you had to steer it before.
but are good at mimicry.
I know engineers who make over double what I make solely because of that skill.
I think we all had that first moment where copilot generates a good snippet, and we were blown away. But having used it for a while now, I find most of what it suggests feels like jokes.
Like it does save some typing / time spent checking docs, but you have to be very careful to check its work.
I’ve definitely seen a lot more impressively voluminous, yet flawed pull requests, since my employer started pushing for everyone to use it.
I foresee a real reckoning of unmaintainable codebases in a couple years.
Looks like two people suckered by the grifters downvoted your comment (as of this writing). Should they read this, it is a grift, get over it.
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I don’t fear Artificial Intelligence, I fear Administrative Idiocy. The managers are the problem.
I know AI can’t replace me. But my boss’s boss’s boss doesn’t know that.
Fortunately, it’s my job as your boss to convince my boss and boss’ boss that AI can’t replace you.
We had a candidate spectacularly fail an interview when they used AI and didn’t catch the incredibly obvious errors it made. I keep a few examples of that handy to defend my peeps in case my boss or boss’s boss decide AI is the way to go.
I hope your actual boss would do that for you.
My boss is a non-technical manager.
I’m so sorry.
My boss asked if I wanted to be a manager, and I said no, but I’ll take the position if offered so it doesn’t go to a non-technical person. I wish that was more common elsewhere.
Good luck sir or madame.
Well, my office recently announced that we’ll be going from 0 days mandatory in office to 3 days a week. After working fully remote for the last few years, I’ll kms before going back, so I’m on the way out anyway.
That sucks. We do 2-days in office, but that was also always the agreement, we were just temporarily remote during COVID (though almost all of us were hired during COVID). My boss tried 3-days in office due to company policy, but we hated it and went back to two.
I cannot stand orgs going back on their word without agreement from the team. I hope you find someplace better.
Thanks, I’m sure I’ll land on my feet. I have a pretty unique skillset for IT (Science HPC admin) and I’m thinking about maybe going back to school and doing a Master’s.
They’ll replace you first, so they can replace your employees… even though you are clearly right.
Yup. But at least I tried, and I’ll have some decent stories for the soup kitchen.
Worst part is some of them aren‘t even idiots, just selfish and reckless. They don‘t care if the company still exists in a year so as long as they can make millions driving it into the ground.
Hacker News was silencing this article outright. That’s typically a sign that its factual enough to strike a nerve with the potential CxO libertarian [slur removed] crowd.
If this is satire, I don’t see it. Because i’ve seen enough of the GenAI crowd openly undermine society/the environment/the culture and be brazen about it; violence is a perfectly normal response.
What happened to HN? I have now heard HN silencing cetain posts multiple times. Is this enshittification?
HN is run by a VC firm, Y Combinator. One of its largest supporters is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Do the math.
That’s depressing
Sam Altman was actually president of Y combinator from 2014 - 2019. An interesting connection when you realise HN has been actively removing news critical of the Gen AI bubble hype.
I want to confirm this. Hacker News is nothing like it used to be and is approaching the cliff of “group think” narrator, the opposite of Entrepreneurship.
Fascinating, I am not surprised at all.
Even beyond AI, some of the implicit messaging has got to strike a nerve with that kind of crowd.
I don’t think this is satire either, more like a playful rant (as opposed to a formal critique).
“If something is silenced, then that must mean it is right” is a pretty bad argument. There are genuinely good reasons to ban something. Being unnecessarily aggressive can be one.
I’m libertarian, I’m against this. I’m also against blockchain scams.
My ideas on digital currencies and something like artificial intelligence are simply an extension of the usual ancap\panarchy ideas. It’s actually a very good test for any libertarian you meet - they’ll usually agree that a “meta-society” consisting of voluntary exterritorial jurisdictions (which can be anything from crack-smoking ancap tribes to solarpunk communes), with some overarching security system to protect those jurisdictions from being ignored by somebody well-armed, is good, then you just have to ask why the systems they like for currencies and this are clearly manifestations of a different ideology.
What. When did we start censoring shit on lemmy.
Hacker News is not Lemmy
Sorry, I don’t understand what you mean by that. The person I replied to had “[slur removed]” in their comment, they’re on lemmy.ml
Oh that. Yeah lemmy.ml has had a swear filter since day 1. In the early days it wasn’t even optional I think, all the servers had it
Hm. I had no idea. Interesting. Isn’t lemmy.ml the lemmy grad sister instance? Like, they’re commies?
Yep. Just another example of their ‘free speech’ principles at work
Another friend of mine was reviewing software intended for emergency services, and the salespeople were not expecting someone handling purchasing in emergency services to be a hardcore programmer. It was this false sense of security that led them to accidentally reveal that the service was ultimately just some dude in India. Listen, I would just be some random dude in India if I swapped places with some of my cousins, so I’m going to choose to take that personally and point out that using the word AI as some roundabout way to sell the labor of people that look like me to foreign governments is fucked up, you’re an unethical monster, and that if you continue to try { thisBullshit(); } you are going to catch (theseHands)
This aspect of it isn’t getting talked about enough. These companies are presenting these things as fully-formed AI, while completely neglecting the people behind the scenes constantly cleaning it up so it doesn’t devolve into chaos. All of the shortcomings and failures of this technology are being masked by the fact that there’s actual people working round the clock pruning and curating it.
You know, humans, with actual human intelligence, without which these miraculous “artificial intelligence” tools would not work as they seem to.
If the "AI’ needs a human support team to keep it “intelligent”, it’s less AI and more a really fancy kind of puppet.
I don’t think the author was referring to people pruning AI data but rather to mechanical turk instances like recently happened with Amazon.
I will learn enough judo to throw you into the sun
best line
I work in AI as a software engineer. Many of my peers have PhD’s, and have sunk a lot of research into their field. I know probably more than the average techie, but in the grand scheme of things I know fuck all. Hell, if you were to ask the scientists I work with if they “know AI” they’ll probably just say “yeah, a little”.
Working in AI has exposed me to so much bullshit, whether it’s job offers for obvious scams that’ll never work, or for “visionaries” that work for consultancies that know as little about AI as the next person, but market themselves as AI experts. One guy had the fucking cheek to send me a message on LinkedIn to say “I see you work in AI, I’m hosting a webinar, maybe you’ll learn something”.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there, and some companies are doing some legitimately cool stuff, but the actual use-cases for these tools where they won’t just be productivity enhancers/tools is low at best. I fully support this guy’s efforts to piledrive people, and will gladly lend him my sword.
Same here. I have seen and worked in entire projects based on AI bullshit.
I feel like some people in this thread are overlooking the tongue in cheek nature of this humour post and taking it weirdly personally
Yeah, that’s what happens when the LLM they use to summarize these articles strips all nuance and comedy.
Even for the internet, this place is truly extremely fond of doing that.
This is such a fun and insightful piece. Unfortunately, the people who really need to read it never will.
Oh my god this whole post is amazing, thought I’d share my favorite excerpt:
This entire class of person is, to put it simply, abhorrent to right-thinking people. They’re an embarrassment to people that are actually making advances in the field, a disgrace to people that know how to sensibly use technology to improve the world, and are also a bunch of tedious know-nothing bastards that should be thrown into Thought Leader Jail until they’ve learned their lesson, a prison I’m fundraising for. Every morning, a figure in a dark hood7, whose voice rasps like the etching of a tombstone, spends sixty minutes giving a TedX talk to the jailed managers about how the institution is revolutionizing corporal punishment, and then reveals that the innovation is, as it has been every day, kicking you in the stomach very hard.
Where the fuck do I donate???
Yeah, this one is the bomb.
“Right-thinking”??
Right as in the actual definition of the word, no political
Conforming with or conformable to justice, law, or morality.
In accordance with fact, reason, or truth; correct.
Fitting, proper, or appropriate.
I get that, didn’t think it was a political meaning. Just seems like an iffy word to me personally, hard to put my finger on it.
Maybe since the inverse would be “wrong-think”?
It’s not that commonly used these days (especially online?), I think the phrasing is a bit old school, but it’s a totally legitimate phrase.
Fair enough, had never heard it before but that makes sense
English your second language? Phrases that seem common to natives may seem off to those who learned English later in life. 'Tis a silly language.
No I just suck at English apparently haha
No, you’re correct, it’s always a little suspect on usage. The kind of thing you only say when you’re up on a high horse, fairly or not.
I’ve been a professional data scientist for 5+ years and I’m okay at my job. Good enough to get 3 different jobs at non FAANG companies and I have already 3 or so hype trains and name changes of what words we use for the same tools and techniques. This AI hype is going to be another one of these with a few niche cases.
Most of my job is insisting on doing something correctly and then being told that doesn’t give the “correct” response based on leadership expectations. I just change what I do until I get the results that people want to see. I’ll just ride this hype wave out here for a few years here learning nothing new again. I’ll find another job based on my experience and requirements gathering to start the cycle again. Maybe I’ll get more data engineering skills which are actually valid
Similarly, my current job (now ending as they want to end remote work and I don’t want to move to a desert in a very red/religious area)- I guided them out of “block chain for supply chain” (lmao it’s cringe to even say that now) into “AI for productivity automation”
I give it 3 years max before all mentions of AI are scrubbed from the home page
Yup. I hope we move back to data mining. I loved to joke that I put on my hardhat and go into the data mine every morning
I’m a data engineer/architect and it’s the same over here, I get asked constantly “how can we stuff AI into this solution?”, never “should we consider using AI here? Is there a value?”, my view, people don’t understand their data and don’t want to put in the effort to understand their data and think that it’ll magically pull actionable insights from their dataswamp, nothing new, that’s been a constant for as long as I recall.
Like I totally understand the draw of new and exciting, but there’s so much you can do with traditional analytics, and in my view you really need to have a good foundation before doing anything else.
Well all the fancy tools give people confidence into their terrible data. Crap in leads to crap out
Best AI rant hands-down. I can agree with every word there.
We need AI because it’s convenient to blame for any problems.
This is actually more terrifying than you might have intended.
I’ve long thought that the greatest danger AI poses is going to be the “man behind the curtain” effect. If people can blame everything on AI then AI can be a blanket covering deliberate harm.
Imagine if government starts using AI for decision making. You could easily end up with a “man behind the curtain” who’s actually calling all the shots and just pretending it’s the AI doing it. Then you’d effectively have a dictatorship where nobody knows/believes they’re in a dictatorship.
Yep AI will definitely be used as stamp of approval for bad decisions. Just give it input and questions in different ways until you get the answer you want, and you can say, hey the fancy AI advised it!
That is some good stuff actually. All the haters can focus on non-existent AI and the rest of us can work on improving society while they are distracted. Perfect scapegoat.
Hey, we can always say: how can you check if an AI is working, it doesn’t come to the office? 🤔
Using satire to convey a known truth some already understand implicitly, some don’t want to acknowledge, some refuse it outright, but when you think about it, we’ve always known how true it is. It’s tongue-in-cheek but it’s necessary in order to convince all these AI-washing fuckheads what a gimmick it is to really be making sweeping statements about a chatbot that still can’t spell lollipop backwards.
I’m not sure this is satire. A lot of hyperbole, but not satire.
This. Satire would be writing the article in the voice of the most vapid executive saying they need to abandon fundamentals and turn exclusively to AI.
However, that would be indistinguishable from our current reality, which would make it poor satire.
After reading that entire post, I wish I had used AI to summarize it.
I am not in the equally unserious camp that generative AI does not have the potential to drastically change the world. It clearly does. When I saw the early demos of GPT-2, while I was still at university, I was half-convinced that they were faked somehow. I remember being wrong about that, and that is why I’m no longer as confident that I know what’s going on.
This pull quote feels like it’s antithetical to their entire argument and makes me feel like all they’re doing is whinging about the fact that people who don’t know what they’re talking about have loud voices. Which has always been true and has little to do with AI.
