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Comment by bs7280 | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed that a lot of people most skeptical of AI coding tools are biased by their experience working exclusively at some of the top software engineering organizations in the world. As someone who has never worked at a company anywhere close to FAANG, I have worked with both people and organization's that are horrifyingly incompetent. A lot of software organization paradigms are designed to play defense against poorly written software.

I feel similar about self driving cars - they don't have to be perfect when half the people on the road are either high, watching reels while driving, or both.

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This has been my experience as well. I see very bright people lampooning LLMs because it doesn't perform up to their expectations when they are easily in the top 1% of talent in their field. I don't think they understand the cognitive load in your average F500 role is NOT very high. Most people are doing jack shit.

Everyone is still holding out hope for a better future. LLM advocates making this argument are saying that the field can never improve, so might as well just let the mediocre machine run rampant.

Perhaps idealistic, perhaps unrealistic. I'd still rather believe.

I think AI adoption is going to be catastrophic and my only hope is that we can slow down and tread carefully. Chances that occurs are slim. I'm certainly not pro AI. It just really angers me to see people still denying the impact.

What catastrophes do you expect?

> A lot of software organization paradigms are designed to play defense against poorly written software.

Maybe. But the organisations who would need the defense most are the some of the least likely to apply them.

Eg it was better run organisations that had version control early, and the worse ones persisted with using shared folders for longer.

And strong type systems like what Haskell or to a lesser extent Rust have to offer are useful as safeguards for anyone, but even more useful when your organisation and its members aren't all that great. Yet again, we see more capable organisations adopting these earlier.

Exactly, we are focusing on the absolute amount of crashes by "self driving" cars.

What we should focus is that are they more or less prone to accidents than actual humans based on amount of km driven.

Again, there are those Expert Drivers who love their manual transmission BMW because automatics shift in the wrong RPM range and abhor any kind of lane assist because it doesn't drive EXACTLY like they do.

But the vast majority of average people on the road will definitely get gains from lane assist and lane keeping functions in cars.

Few things enrage me like the smell of cannabis on the highway after it was legalized in my state. Sure, hypothetically, that's the passenger. But more likely than not, it's DUI.

Sitting in a Jeep with no doors, no top, no windows has revealed to me just how common cannabis is in my state, even not yet legalized. Hate the smell.

What, as opposed to the people on painkillers, xanax, caffeine, nicotine, and of course the actual worst... too little sleep, too much alcohol, and their phones.

Other things also being wrong does not make driving under the influence of cannabis any less wrong.

The studies are actually pretty interesting here...

This article is from 2021 - https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/crash-rates-jump-in-wake-of...

The conclusion seems to be that if you _only_ smoke marijuana you're actually less likely to be involved in a crash than a sober driver, but if you combine marijuana with alcohol you're _more_ likely to crash (which, duh).

Obviously not totally conclusive, but interesting none the less. Anecdotally, coming from a high school where folk smoke and drove all the time because they couldn't smoke in their houses or on the street where they'd face police harassment, it was always the alcohol that got them nabbed for DUIs. It's anecdotal, but my anecdotes are many and I'm not sure I've heard of any one I've ever known crashing while just smoking weed.

So... maybe everyone should toke a little before they drive, sounds like they'd leave more distance between the cars in front of them, and go at a more relaxed pace, and not try to do any crazy passes of the people in front of them. Road rage is a very real thing in America, and the stereotype isn't of your typical stoner.

> The conclusion seems to be that if you _only_ smoke marijuana you're actually less likely to be involved in a crash than a sober driver, [...]

I assume that's not a randomised controlled study? Ie there's probably all kinds of confounders etc.

Off topic of my original comment but I live in Chicago and have seen some of the most batshit insane drivers / behavior on the road you could imagine. People smoking are often the least of my worries (not to say its ok).

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