alfalfasprout

5 ms·

31.
by alfalfasprout 5mo ago
Yep. And this is why as hard as AI companies are pushing that these tools can be a replacement for expertise, it's ironic that the experts are the ones that often get the highest ROI because they know how to converse about the relevant
32.
by alfalfasprout 6mo ago
Yep. Trust is easy to lose, hard to earn. A nondeterministic black box that is likely buggy, will almost certainly change, and has a likelihood of getting enshittified is not a very good value proposition to build on top of or invest in. In
33.
by alfalfasprout 6mo ago
Well, part of the problem too is there's zero accountability. Who decides what it means to be aligned and how does that evolve over time? No matter what, common people are quickly losing agency in that discussion.
34.
by alfalfasprout 6mo ago
It's quite prevalent in tech too-- however, folks tend to be quiet because the "use AI for everything or else" hammer is being used across the industry.
35.
by alfalfasprout 6mo ago
> Strangely I find traditional software engineers, especially experienced ones, are generally the worst at achieving success. They often treat working with an agent too much like software engineering and end up building bad software rath
36.
by alfalfasprout 6mo ago
100% agreed. Sadly, lots of people out there with the "trust me bro, just need more compute". Hopefully we don't consume all the planet's resources trying.
37.
by alfalfasprout 6mo ago
Well, A-10s are well suited for strafing runs, etc. Presumably they'd be sent in if the area they're entering is presumed safe. That clearly didn't pan out. The reality is avoiding a ground operation was probably the wrong mo
38.
by alfalfasprout 6mo ago
Acting within your morals is not incompatible with serving the company's interests. Especially if it means your team is very much still competent while maintaining a culture that is healthy. That leads to better delivery. Avoiding work
39.
by alfalfasprout 6mo ago
the whole AI space is rife with much worse example of what could be considered securities fraud tbh
40.
by alfalfasprout 6mo ago
Yeah but TCAS works inside each airplane. ATC (and ground operations) require coordinating across multiple types of aircraft, at airports across the world, with high precision AND humans in the loop (there are A LOT of edge cases). This is
41.
by alfalfasprout 6mo ago
It's not though... it's sitting a hair above 90%
42.
by alfalfasprout 6mo ago
When organizational incentives penalize NOT using AI and firing the bottom x% regularly then are you really surprised LLM outputs aren't being scrutinized?
43.
by alfalfasprout 7mo ago
Yep. I've seen this personally. The ROI of a great engineer is bigger than ever.
44.
by alfalfasprout 7mo ago
This reads like a bad linkedin post...
45.
by alfalfasprout 7mo ago
Also consider using Cerebras' inference APIs. They released a voice demo a while back and the latency of their model inference is insane.
46.
by alfalfasprout 7mo ago
Cerebras is a totally different product though. They can (theoretically) run any frontier model provided it gets compiled a certain way. Like a wafer scale TPU. This is using hardwired weights with on-die SRAM used for K/V for example.
47.
by alfalfasprout 7mo ago
I've been using this for a few months now and it's amazing. Crazy fast and the vast majority of the time I get the result I want in one shot.
48.
by alfalfasprout 7mo ago
They have prebuilt binaries now for fff
49.
by alfalfasprout 7mo ago
The thing is, the barrier isn't near zero. The time to reach an MVP has just decreased. But you still very much need expertise, strategy, etc. to deliver something worthwhile. The bar has just increased.
50.
by alfalfasprout 8mo ago
You'll see on HN itself how many people want to work on this surveillance. How many people want all white collar work eliminated by AI. How many people want a quick buck at anyone's expense, the morality be damned. Money and o
51.
by alfalfasprout 8mo ago
This is easily the most spot-on comment I've read on HN in a long time. The humility of understanding what you don't know and the limitations of that is out the window for many people now. I see time and time again the idea that &
52.
by alfalfasprout 8mo ago
> Similar to the media, I've picked up on vibes from academia that have a baseline AI negative tilt. The media is extremely pro-AI (and a quick look at their ownership structure gives you a hint as to why). You seem to be projecting
53.
by alfalfasprout 8mo ago
I'm writing a blog post on this very thing actually. Outsourcing learning and thinking is a double edged sword that only comes back to bite you later. It's tempting: you might already know a codebase well and you set agents loose
54.
by alfalfasprout 8mo ago
> It is simply not cost effective any more to write code manually vs. proper use of agents, and developers who resist that will find it increasingly hard to stay employed. In practice, this isn't bearing out at all though both among
55.
by alfalfasprout 8mo ago
Agreed, it's funny how people have taken unrestrained use of AI as an axiom at this point. There very much is still time to significantly control it + regulate it. Is there enough appetite by those in power (across the political spectr
56.
by alfalfasprout 8mo ago
Not sure why this is being downvoted. It's spot on. You see folks like Dario et al. raising the alarm bells about what they claim is coming... while working as hard as they can to bring that gloomy future to fruition. No one in power i
57.
by alfalfasprout 8mo ago
100% this. all of this spending is predicated on a stratospheric ROI on AI investments at the proposed investment levels. If that doesn't pan out, we'll see a lot of people left holding the cards including chip fabs, designers l
58.
by alfalfasprout 8mo ago
The problem is getting there 90% but poorly makes that last 10% much harder.
59.
by alfalfasprout 8mo ago
You should see the code. It's true slop. The organization makes no sense.
60.
by alfalfasprout 8mo ago
What a silly take. Where the tech is is extremely relevant. The reality of this blog post is it shows the tech is clearly not going anywhere better either, as they seem to imply. 24 hours of useless code is still useless code. This idea tha

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