Technology

Yeah, ethical, environmental, legal and fuck the consumer memory questions aside.

Any engineer fighting the use of LLM’s will ultimately find that their peers are achieving more in a shorter time then they are.

How do you measure that?

I am asking because I tried all the AI coding tools (copilot, cursor, claude code, etc.), even the paid versions, to find the utopia that doubles my productivity where lots of people are talking about. But everytime I find they take more time to generate code than me typing it, they rarely get things right the first time, they produce way more code than needed (which is much more to reason about) and all in all it takes longer to achieve something using "AI" instead of doing it on my own.

The worst results are the ones that seem to be correct, but can only be found incorrect on closer inspection. For instances, a part of my job is to write data collection applications for sensors; those sensors come with a datasheet (usually 100 to 200 pages) that explain how to "talk" to the sensor. Sounds perfect for an LLM - throw the datasheet in, get a small C application out. But either I get something that does not even compile, or something that seems to collect data, but configures the sensor completely wrong. Debugging that takes more time than just working through the datasheet myself and program it myself.

But if you use a tool to fix your grammar, you never learn the rules of grammar for yourself.

Agreed, although simply using LLMs to do your thinking for you is only going to decrease your value in the workplace and make you more replaceable. The goal needs to be learning how to use AI to expand your thinking, counteract your biases, improve the quality of your work, and accelerate your learning.

This falls apart the second you look at it when you see that it doesn't take much learning to use that tool for most applications.

At the same time, people overly reliant on that tool take a big hit in developing and strengthening their own skilks and thinking capabilities.

Combine the two things if you still can.

I am 100% fine with being left behind by a technology that I see as an attempted corporate surveillance scheme that has metastasized into a giant money pit. The difference from the 80's and 90's is people were actually using computers to make money back then. If any AI company is actually making more money than they're spending, I haven't heard about it, and you'd think they'd be advertising it. https://isaiprofitable.com/

I've been happy to fully sit this one out thus far. Don't feel like I'm missing a damn thing.

Oh no I'll be left behind when the Titanic leaves port?! How utterly tragic!

Tragic for everyone who WASN'T "left behind", anyway.

The fact that you compared "AI powered sex doll" to Linus using an LLM to generate code he reviewed and accepted (as if he's reviewing any of the many contributions he reviews and constantly rejects for the simplest mistakes) shows that you know nothing about the different applications of "AI".

Yes, the "AI powered" sex toy is an example of an idiotic scam, the AI powered assistant that hallucinates in a conversation isn't very useful, but code that literally does what it should do, reviewed by a competent engineer, is no different from reviewing code from any of your coworkers. It's code, if it's garbage you reject it, is it isn't then the tool was useful.