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They're shoving AI everywhere because it's extraordinarily powerful and truly differentiating. Being jaded and cynical about it doesn't change that reality. Ob

They're shoving AI everywhere because it's extraordinarily powerful and truly differentiating. Being jaded and cynical about it doesn't change that reality. Obviously there will be winners and losers and it will shake out -- personally I can't imagine using notepad for more than pasting arbitrary text and it seems like the least features is the best -- but bonafide text tools without AI in 2024 are crippling.

NamTaf 2y ago
You’re right that it is certainly differentiating for me, but not in a good way.
croes 2y ago
If AI is so powerful why don’t we see a massive productivity spike around the globe? It may be convenient but more than once just replaced the time I needed to write my code by time fine tuning the prompt because the AI didn’t quite got what I wanted. On top of that I must review foreign code. That’s harder than code I already know. And on top of that the end result lacks the feeling of accomplishment in solving a problem because it wasn’t me who wrote it. I‘m degraded to some kind customer of the AI. Assembly line workers are said to be alienated from the product they produce, I guess the same will happen for AI users.
- llm_nerd 2y ago
  >If AI is so powerful why don’t we see a massive productivity spike around the globe? We overestimate the short term effects and underestimate the long term effects (Amara's law). We're currently in the trough of disillusionment where people are running around saying that AI failed, was overblown, etc, while people like me are working with corporations to completely change how they operate, to an outrageous efficiency boost. Our world is going to look very different in a decade. >It may be convenient but more than once just replaced the time I needed to write my code by time fine tuning the prompt because the AI didn’t quite got what I wanted Most software developers spend very little of their time actually "coding", and most of their time investigating, understanding, comparing, and so on. I have never used AI for "production" code -- I never copy/paste something into my code -- but dozens of times a day I do use it to get rough outlines, investigate libraries and their use, and most importantly to get heuristics on paths to take in the code I do write. It has proven absolutely invaluable to me and I can't imagine not having it as an accelerator now.
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    > Our world is going to look very different in a decade. I agree with this. I just seriously doubt that it's going to look better because of it. I suspect the opposite.
  - nitwit005 2y ago
    It can't simultaneously not show up in efficiency data, and provide an "outrageous efficiency boost".
    - llm_nerd 2y ago
      What imaginary "efficiency data" are you citing? Ignoring that US "productivity" data has been skyrocketing, when loads of large orgs are laying off loads of people and specifically citing it as the reason, maybe it is actually starting to have an impact?
      - nitwit005 2y ago
        If it is causing a huge gain in efficiency, it should be trivial to demonstrate with data. You're talking about "Amara's law", and "trough of disillusionment". None of that shit matters. Just share the data, and people will agree.
JohnFen 2y ago
> They're shoving AI everywhere because it's extraordinarily powerful and truly differentiating. Differentiating, sure. Extraordinarily powerful? I disagree (outside of certain specific niches).
autoexec 2y ago
> They're shoving AI everywhere because it's extraordinarily powerful and truly differentiating. How does this explain the fact that people don't want AI. Just having AI in your product description makes people hate your product (https://www.techspot.com/news/104122-study-finds-including-ai-product-descriptions-makes-them.html https://www.techspot.com/news/104122-study-finds-including-a...) As soon as AI is added to anything people immediately start googling how to disable it (including when google added AI)
- llm_nerd 2y ago
  >Just having AI in your product description makes people hate your product They compare "AI" to "New Technology", and there was a mild preference for the phrase "New Technology". Casting that as "hating" it is a bit of a misrepresentation. Further "AI" as a general term is mysterious and unknown. One of their examples was an "AI-Powered TV"...like, what does that even mean? Or an "AI-powered financial service". They sound terrible. >As soon as AI is added to anything people immediately start googling how to disable it Okay? Some people dislike almost everything new or different. Most people don't. If every major company is busy trying to get in front of AI, maybe it isn't quite the big "makes everyone hate it!" thing you imagine it is, no?
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    It's a 15% reduction on intention to buy (on the TV case, 20% on the car) just by putting AI there on the name is a really big deal. That's about half of the deviation on the data. The ugly is that it's a self-reported poll, but it's a well run self-reported poll, with a large effect, and good statistical relevance. The actual article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2368040#d1e606 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2...
    - llm_nerd 2y ago
      Ooof, boy is Apple in for a disaster with their iPhone and Mac products! Has someone told them? Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, and all of the other big companies as well! They're doomed! Putting an amorphous "AI-powered" on an imaginary product is nonsensical, and doesn't carry over to the conclusion that "people hate AI". Yes, I would be wary of a "AI-powered coffee maker" or an "AI-powered toothbrush" because that just sounds like nonsense. But there are a lot of places where people already understand the value proposition, and the more people experience it, the more they demand it and it becomes entry stakes. Just the most trivial example: one of my children has a habit of sending thoughts as a long series of texts. One thought split over a dozen texts. The "AI-powered" summarization of notifications in iOS 18.2 is absolutely brilliant for those times I can only glance, looking at it in detail when the situation avails. Thus far it has been 100% accurate and profoundly useful. That's the most tosser, simplistic example of many, many ways AI has added to my life.
RajT88 2y ago
My favorite use of notepad is cleaning my clipboard of formatted data. Yes, you can use Ctrl+alt+v but not all applications support it, and not all applications that do consistently respect it. The windows clipboard is a functional mess and getting worse.
- llm_nerd 2y ago
  100%. Notepad has always been just a simple ASCII text tool, with Wordpad being the discount word processor. Microsoft's insistence in shoving word processing features into Notepad has never made sense.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
llm_nerd 2y ago
Replying to myself here- whtsthmttrmn left the following comment, but then deleted it- "I know this is rude to say, but I feel you weren't too skilled before LLMs became a household term." This is such a howler that I am going to indirectly reply to them here because this is a position that comes up constantly as some sort of rather strange defensive posture: A Luddist "If you aren't dismissive of them, clearly you must be mediocre. Look at my world-weary cynicism that makes me elite" I've worked in software development for just shy of three decades. I have been a lead engineer or organization-wide architect for multiple medium to large organizations. I was a "senior engineer" at 23 for an industrial controls company. I have always been the guy when it comes to coding challenges or choices at every single organization I've worked at. I've done embedded development, did interactive web applications before almost anyone, have published papers and magazine articles, and have an extremely rich resume across many languages and platforms, with a long history of wins. Yeah, I'm pretty good at this stuff. And I find "AI" extremely useful to my life. I have subscriptions across multiple products, and at this moment am building a Jina v3 embedding system for an insurance company. Sneering and acting dismissive isn't going to make it not the game changer that it is. It's coming and you can't stuff your head into sand. Well...you can, but you're just assuring your upcoming unemployment. In fact let me turn this completely around and say that only the truly mediocre are riding this Luddism train. In an average day I'm working across a half dozen different programming languages, multiple platforms, many endpoints and toolings, and operations and mathematics that I constantly have to refresh myself on. If I was doing copy/pasta template code all day in a tiny little niche I probably wouldn't find LLMs useful. But I don't, so I do.
optymizer 2y ago
I've been through quite a few hype cycles in my time on this Earth. What you call "reality," I call "been there, done that". Enjoy the ride.
tigerlily 2y ago
> Being jaded and cynical about it doesn't change that reality. Downvotetards need to understand this harder to break out of their funk. Criminally underrated comment, thank you and I wish I could give you more karma.

NamTaf 2y ago

You’re right that it is certainly differentiating for me, but not in a good way.

croes 2y ago

If AI is so powerful why don’t we see a massive productivity spike around the globe? It may be convenient but more than once just replaced the time I needed to write my code by time fine tuning the prompt because the AI didn’t quite got what I wanted. On top of that I must review foreign code. That’s harder than code I already know. And on top of that the end result lacks the feeling of accomplishment in solving a problem because it wasn’t me who wrote it. I‘m degraded to some kind customer of the AI. Assembly line workers are said to be alienated from the product they produce, I guess the same will happen for AI users.

llm_nerd 2y ago
>If AI is so powerful why don’t we see a massive productivity spike around the globe? We overestimate the short term effects and underestimate the long term effects (Amara's law). We're currently in the trough of disillusionment where people are running around saying that AI failed, was overblown, etc, while people like me are working with corporations to completely change how they operate, to an outrageous efficiency boost. Our world is going to look very different in a decade. >It may be convenient but more than once just replaced the time I needed to write my code by time fine tuning the prompt because the AI didn’t quite got what I wanted Most software developers spend very little of their time actually "coding", and most of their time investigating, understanding, comparing, and so on. I have never used AI for "production" code -- I never copy/paste something into my code -- but dozens of times a day I do use it to get rough outlines, investigate libraries and their use, and most importantly to get heuristics on paths to take in the code I do write. It has proven absolutely invaluable to me and I can't imagine not having it as an accelerator now.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  > Our world is going to look very different in a decade. I agree with this. I just seriously doubt that it's going to look better because of it. I suspect the opposite.
- nitwit005 2y ago
  It can't simultaneously not show up in efficiency data, and provide an "outrageous efficiency boost".
  - llm_nerd 2y ago
    What imaginary "efficiency data" are you citing? Ignoring that US "productivity" data has been skyrocketing, when loads of large orgs are laying off loads of people and specifically citing it as the reason, maybe it is actually starting to have an impact?
    - nitwit005 2y ago
      If it is causing a huge gain in efficiency, it should be trivial to demonstrate with data. You're talking about "Amara's law", and "trough of disillusionment". None of that shit matters. Just share the data, and people will agree.

JohnFen 2y ago

> They're shoving AI everywhere because it's extraordinarily powerful and truly differentiating. Differentiating, sure. Extraordinarily powerful? I disagree (outside of certain specific niches).

autoexec 2y ago

> They're shoving AI everywhere because it's extraordinarily powerful and truly differentiating. How does this explain the fact that people don't want AI. Just having AI in your product description makes people hate your product (https://www.techspot.com/news/104122-study-finds-including-ai-product-descriptions-makes-them.html https://www.techspot.com/news/104122-study-finds-including-a...) As soon as AI is added to anything people immediately start googling how to disable it (including when google added AI)

llm_nerd 2y ago
>Just having AI in your product description makes people hate your product They compare "AI" to "New Technology", and there was a mild preference for the phrase "New Technology". Casting that as "hating" it is a bit of a misrepresentation. Further "AI" as a general term is mysterious and unknown. One of their examples was an "AI-Powered TV"...like, what does that even mean? Or an "AI-powered financial service". They sound terrible. >As soon as AI is added to anything people immediately start googling how to disable it Okay? Some people dislike almost everything new or different. Most people don't. If every major company is busy trying to get in front of AI, maybe it isn't quite the big "makes everyone hate it!" thing you imagine it is, no?
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  It's a 15% reduction on intention to buy (on the TV case, 20% on the car) just by putting AI there on the name is a really big deal. That's about half of the deviation on the data. The ugly is that it's a self-reported poll, but it's a well run self-reported poll, with a large effect, and good statistical relevance. The actual article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2368040#d1e606 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2...
  - llm_nerd 2y ago
    Ooof, boy is Apple in for a disaster with their iPhone and Mac products! Has someone told them? Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, and all of the other big companies as well! They're doomed! Putting an amorphous "AI-powered" on an imaginary product is nonsensical, and doesn't carry over to the conclusion that "people hate AI". Yes, I would be wary of a "AI-powered coffee maker" or an "AI-powered toothbrush" because that just sounds like nonsense. But there are a lot of places where people already understand the value proposition, and the more people experience it, the more they demand it and it becomes entry stakes. Just the most trivial example: one of my children has a habit of sending thoughts as a long series of texts. One thought split over a dozen texts. The "AI-powered" summarization of notifications in iOS 18.2 is absolutely brilliant for those times I can only glance, looking at it in detail when the situation avails. Thus far it has been 100% accurate and profoundly useful. That's the most tosser, simplistic example of many, many ways AI has added to my life.

RajT88 2y ago

My favorite use of notepad is cleaning my clipboard of formatted data. Yes, you can use Ctrl+alt+v but not all applications support it, and not all applications that do consistently respect it. The windows clipboard is a functional mess and getting worse.

llm_nerd 2y ago
100%. Notepad has always been just a simple ASCII text tool, with Wordpad being the discount word processor. Microsoft's insistence in shoving word processing features into Notepad has never made sense.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

llm_nerd 2y ago

Replying to myself here- whtsthmttrmn left the following comment, but then deleted it- "I know this is rude to say, but I feel you weren't too skilled before LLMs became a household term." This is such a howler that I am going to indirectly reply to them here because this is a position that comes up constantly as some sort of rather strange defensive posture: A Luddist "If you aren't dismissive of them, clearly you must be mediocre. Look at my world-weary cynicism that makes me elite" I've worked in software development for just shy of three decades. I have been a lead engineer or organization-wide architect for multiple medium to large organizations. I was a "senior engineer" at 23 for an industrial controls company. I have always been the guy when it comes to coding challenges or choices at every single organization I've worked at. I've done embedded development, did interactive web applications before almost anyone, have published papers and magazine articles, and have an extremely rich resume across many languages and platforms, with a long history of wins. Yeah, I'm pretty good at this stuff. And I find "AI" extremely useful to my life. I have subscriptions across multiple products, and at this moment am building a Jina v3 embedding system for an insurance company. Sneering and acting dismissive isn't going to make it not the game changer that it is. It's coming and you can't stuff your head into sand. Well...you can, but you're just assuring your upcoming unemployment. In fact let me turn this completely around and say that only the truly mediocre are riding this Luddism train. In an average day I'm working across a half dozen different programming languages, multiple platforms, many endpoints and toolings, and operations and mathematics that I constantly have to refresh myself on. If I was doing copy/pasta template code all day in a tiny little niche I probably wouldn't find LLMs useful. But I don't, so I do.

optymizer 2y ago

I've been through quite a few hype cycles in my time on this Earth. What you call "reality," I call "been there, done that". Enjoy the ride.

tigerlily 2y ago

> Being jaded and cynical about it doesn't change that reality. Downvotetards need to understand this harder to break out of their funk. Criminally underrated comment, thank you and I wish I could give you more karma.