drw85

So you subscribe to the Microsoft CoPilot 365 App or whatever it's called now.

I don't think it sounds crazy at all.

To me this feels as made-up as many reddit stories are.

Either by the so-called 'operator' of the bot, or by the author.

This is the problem with the LLM fallacy.

You think it'll rapidly get smarter, but it just recreates things from all the terrible code it was fed. Code and how it is written also rapidly changes these days and LLMs have some trouble drawing lines between versions of things and the changes within them.

Sure, they can compile and test things now, which might make the code work and able to run. The quality of it will be hard to increase without manually controlling and limiting the type of code it 'learns' from.

> Is it maintainable? Well it's AI that's going to maintain it.

That's what's currently not possible, it might work in a small webapp or similar. But in a large system, it absolutely falls apart when having to maintain it. Sure, it can fix a bug, but it doesn't understand the side effects it creates with the fix, yet.

Maybe in the future that will also be possible. I do agree with you about business/management not caring about long term impacts if short term gains are possible.

I also think this is why AI works okay-ish on tiny new greenfield webapps and absolutely doesn't on large legacy software.

You can't accurately plan every little detail in an existing codebase, because you'll only find out about all the edge cases and side effects when trying to work in it.

So, sure, you can plan what your feature is supposed to do, but your plan of how to do that will change the minute you start working in the codebase.

Your computer could also be used as part of a botnet or to commit crimes from. Not all malware/viruses are used to directly steal from the target.

For MS, it's currently eroding through every single one of their products.

Azure, Office, Visual Studio, VS Code, Windows are all shipping faster than ever, but so much stuff is unfinished, buggy, incompatible to existing things, etc.

It can also backfire and sometimes give you absolute made-up nonsense. Or waste your whole day moving in a circle around a problem.

I think there are a few people out there with great ideas, that might benefit from having access to tools to make these real. I'm all for those and would love to see them.

But i also think the majority of these cases will be bad ideas that don't need to be made at all. Or even ideas that are AI generated by asking a LLM for ideas. I don't care if they are made or not, but i would rather not have those on the internet and especially on 'show and tell' places like ShowHN etc.

I'm also not opposed to using AI as a tool in development or similar. But there are more and more examples of purely vibe-coded or generated things and those fall in a different category in my opinion.

The point is the following:

If you want a chef to explain and show his recipe and then you find out he asked chat gpt or got it from a recipe website, would you still be interested in hearing about the 'journey' he took?

If that chef then also ordered the food from a catering service by forwarding that recipe to them, does it make sense to interview him about his craft and listen to him?

It's the same with creative things. Sure, you can ask a musician or a painter about their inspiration/process etc., because they went through the process and made something. You could learn something from them, other than 'here's how i asked someone else to make this'.

So, going to an art forum and displaying your AI generated art there, ready to answer questions about the process is pretty much completely pointless and also cheapens every actual artist that came there to display and talk about something they actually made.

It also has a psychological effect on the people that use it. I know some people that get immense feelings of accomplishment out of using AI to generate art and music. They feel like they made something and are proud about it. For a lot of people like that, any incentive to learn about things is gone, because they get the exact same feeling by using AI to make it.

On the other hand: If you are an artist making things and there are a million people generating things every 5 minutes and showing it around everywhere, it dilutes recognition of what you made. You show it to your friends and they're like: Oh yeah, i made like 5 of those yesterday.

> My claim is that they’re seeing something they want to exist and they’re making it exist and putting it out there, while the vast majority of haters aren’t exactly out there contributing to much of anything in terms of “real software engineering.”

Except that they didn't. They thought of something and then asked a tool to make it badly. I know it's hard to separate for a lot of people and it makes them feel like they made something. It's especially bad when that thing then has stuff on it like "Made with attention to accuracy" or some similar marketing claim when there is zero accuracy and a bunch of mistakes in there.

But me running the cmd to create the Hello World angular example does not mean i made anything.

This response makes it 100% clear to me that this is just a bot. The verbatim use of a completely random thing like 'custom math libraries for cross-CPU determinism', combined with the agreeable tone and em dash use are pretty much a dead giveaway.

The internet has become so useless, everywhere is just marketing nonsense and bots.

If it was for personal use, it wouldn't be on the internet and advertised on sites like this.

So it is at least marketed for personal reasons. I don't know why, but it could be for ad revenue, resume filling, ego bolstering.

This is the problem with AI music generation too. Many people actually feel like they made something and are proud, despite just having clicked a button after asking for a result. This gives them some kind of feeling of accomplishment, despite having done absolutely nothing for it.

The title even says so 'I quit, but AI brought me back'. No, it didn't, you're not back, you just paid someone on Fiver a couple bucks and then used his work to pretend you're back.

Because it's better for marketing. Doesn't matter if it's true.

Search in general on all redesigned Apple apps is like solving a puzzle to figure out where it is. In some apps you have to be on a specific page and then scroll up to magically make it pop out. So intuitive...

I think this applies to almost all modern software.

Apple Mail automatically adds calendar entries from attachments in my junk mail to my calendar. I get tons of spam/phishing mails with appointments attached that i now manually have to delete from my calendar all the time. There is no dedicated setting to disable this, according to Apple support, deactivating Siri integration inside calendar and mail app settings will prevent this, but it doesn't.

MS Outlook has switched from their native code to a WebView inside a wrapper and that means we're back in the 90s when it comes to email. Basic features like adding an image inline no longer work, the option to enable this is buried in some badly worded menus and of course it resets after each update and also gets renamed in each update.

Software quality, especially from the big corps, is just absolute garbage these days. Designed by people that don't use it and built by people that have 6 months of web dev experience.

Which is now piece by piece becoming the Desktop version by wrapping it in some WebView junk.

This is exactly the problem.

Companies currently are being sold that they can replace employees with little agents that cost $20 to $200 a month.

But then they realize that the $200 last for about 3.5 hours on day 1 of the month and the rest will be charged by the token. Which will then cost as much or more than the employee did, but with a nice guaranteed quota of non determinism and failure rate included.

I personally don't know a single person that would pay $80 for some LLM. Most people i know pay nothing, or got a 1 year sub of a phone purchase or similar.

Also, everyone here conveniently always forgets the huge hardware and datacenter upfront investment that MS have already made. That cost alone will never be recouped with current prices.

If you can't even run the thing close to profitable, then how will you ever actually profit?

But don't worry guys, your robotaxi will recoup your tesla purchase within a year while you sleep.

I think this time is the first time that it will actually hurt all the large corps investing gazillions of dollars into AI infra.

Shipping some ads in windows? Doesn't really hurt you, it makes you extra money. Sure, some customers get a little annoyed, but who cares.

But this time they invested huge amounts of money to chase something that will likely never get profitable and return enough to pay off.

I think these kinds of problems were already solved using ML and to a pretty high accuracy.

But now everyone is trying to make chatbots do that job and they are awful at it.

In my experience, most devs and companies don't consider the dependencies they load 'their' code. They only look at the code they write, not everything they deploy.

Making a bicycle with square wheels is not being ahead of it's time, though.

Most of the time MS is actually delivering something successful is when they are very late or bought it and put their sticker on it.

Gaming is a massive loss leader, MS will never make back the money they invested to buy other publishers. The subscription model will fail aswell, prices will have to go up more, to try and actually make some profit.

Microsoft themselves have actually made it a technical one. By dropping support for perfectly fine computer without TPM/SecureBoot, they have made it an actual technical decision to install an alternative to their OS.

Actually in the latest MacOS release it constantly trains local models for all kinds of junk without asking you at all.

I had to disable all that AI garbage in the settings after researching a bunch of local inference and training processes that were grinding my MacBook to a halt every time it woke up from sleep.

I don't think that's the right direction to go in.

Despite needing much knowledge of how a planes inner workings function, a pilot is still a pilot and not an aircraft engineer.

Just because you know how human psychology works when it comes to making purchase decision and you are good at applying that to sell things, you're not a sales engineer.

Giving something a fake name, to make it seem more complicated or aspirational than it actually is makes you a bullshit engineer in my opinion.

I had the same problem. Installing vulkan libraries fixed that for me.

It's doable with commercial puzzle glue, but you have to apply from both sides to prevent warping.

I don't think anyone is questioning current or future capabilities.

It's more of a question if it will ever actually be profitable or marketable without subsidizing most of the cost of running it.

We're seeing the same with streaming services right now. 5-10 years ago, everyone thought they needed their own streaming service and heavily invested into building one and acquiring licenses or producing content for it. Now we're seeing the part where they are trying to make it profitable by raising prices/adding ads or both.

I'm not sure if OpenAI will ever be able to just run by themselves. Without major outside investments to subsidize the cost of actually having users use their services.