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Comment by miek | Hacker News Reader

My very large employer has always been glacially slow on modernization and tech adoption. It may now, oddly enough, become a competitive advantage.

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Literally the plot of Battlestar Galactica! Life imitates art indeed...

who is the Starbuck of AI?

plot twist: it's Starbuck

Or Mr Krabs' fear of robot overloads keeping technology at bay in the Krusty Krab!

yes, I was never so happy to work in Germany. People used to joke about the proverbial fax machine still being a thing but I've never been so glad to work in a culture where this mania doesn't exist. Reading HN is like entering Alice's Wonderland of token maxxers and AI psychotics. Genuinely don't know a single person here who is forced to work like this.

Ah so it's like 2000 again. Germany will go even farther behind it seems

If the people that walk before you go into the abyss, staying behind isn't wrong.

Germany is standing at the abyss. America is one step ahead.

this is social media induced psychosis my friend

I have this image in my head of people flushing their country down the toilet and going "wheeee!" while they're getting spun around.

Actually, I have been wondering to which extend the AI craze has reached the DACH region. I don't work for any company and neither do my friends. HN is essentially my only peephole into the world of commercial software development and I'm aware that it's extremely biased towards Big Tech and SV startup culture.

I can give you a single data point from Germany.

I work at a hosting provider that has pretty conservative customers who don't want to host on AWS/Azure due to data privacy / safety concerns, among other things.

For us, sending customer data to the US is a big no-go.

We have been experimenting with LLM usage, first through a Gemini subscription, then also with the Claude API. Participation has been lightly encouraged by management. As for coding, we haven't let the LLMs loose on our core components, but tooling on the fringes (like deployment scripts, reporting) has seen some uptick in LLM usage.

We have also started building an on-premise inference cluster, which is in alpha testing, and where the "don't include customer data" restriction doesn't apply anymore.

do you mean this aesthetically or quantitatively? Are they actually outcompeting / making more money ? Or do you mean they are now looking more desirable because their competitors are racing to the bottom (though likely making money on the way down)

That has probably been an advantage since the move of everything into the web.

Spoiler: it's not

It is absolutely going to be a competitive advantage if it isn't already. When your competitors' products suck because they are using LLMs to write them, and yours work because you aren't, customers notice.

That assumes there's no way to use LLMs in a productive manner

Every power user of LLMs thinks that they are the ones that know how to hold it correctly, in reality they usually have major Dunning Kruger and are convinced they're living in some hyper productivity mode when actually they're all just copying each other making low effort slop that all sounds the same, looks the same and does the same things.

This indicates exposure to only surface-level, greenfield part of the industry

Aw was your comment too unhinged? Or is it because you confused it for Ghost Robotics?

For the record, the comment you deleted was something to the effect of:

checks notes

The company you work for is committing genocide. You should be locked up in a concrete cell for 10-15 years for working at <wrong robotics company because you're a dufus>

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Maybe get better notes? Or try going offline for 10-15 years?

I should go offline? I deleted my comment after I realized my mistake before you ever even responded. Relax.

Risk aversion is a tradeoff, not always a weakness.

The people using the LLMs are the risk, not the LLMs themselves

Frankly, if you think this, why do you think you're special? If people using LLMs are bad, how are you not also subject to the same issues they are?

Because just like a scalpel you have to know how to use it.

No risk, no reward

This is not a mystery

Also, "risk" and "bad" are not the same thing

No offense, but if you think your using AI in the development and design of your site, voxos.ai , gave you a competitive advantage it didn't. I can instantly tell when someone used an LLM to build their whole site and lets just say... Its not a good thing.

I'm absolutely outraged. Thank you for this valuable feedback!

I'm not even trying to be mean, although it probably comes off that way. I'm just saying we live in a world with handmade watches from Switzerland and mass manufactured watches made in Vietnam. Nobody cares about the mass manufactured watch from Vietnam, whereas the handmade watch gets all the attention (and money). We now live in a world with the same dichotomy of software. Be creative with your pursuits, put effort into them it will pay off.

Nice analogy.

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