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Comment You have to know programming for AI to work (Score 1) 113

A co-worker told me that AI is like working with a jr programmer, who never says no, and constantly lies. AI has no ability to say "I don't know", it will always deliver an answer, because most AI is a neural network, which is just a giant pachinko machine. So whatever AI spits out, you have to be able to have programmed it to know if it is good code or not and fix any flaws. To me this seems exactly like the offshore developer craze in the 80s and 90s. I have worked with lots of very talented overseas developers and they are cheaper, but I don't know how many projects I have been brought into to fix that were built by bottom dollar overseas teams. One literally had a 100 nested if statement instead of using something like recursion. Often we would throw away their code and start over as it was faster to fix. And 80% or more of the time with a software project is maintenance. How are you going to do that with AI spaghetti, because the person who used AI did not really know how to program? That feels exactly like what is going to happen with AI.

Comment social media is like this too (Score 1) 49

I wish people would also understand there is no social in social media. It is content created by users for the main objective to make money and push public opinion. People would treat it a lot differently if they got to see all the metrics the algorithms decide when they suggest something. "engagement", "controversial", etc would take the human face of it. Buy social media and AI try and put a human face on how they work to specifically mask that.

Comment Re:It happens (Score 1) 56

your only good backup is the one you last tested ... successfully. I worked for a company and a critical database was deleted. We had backups, but management thought it was a waste of time so we never tested them. Well, the incremental backup was bad. Daily backups were bad. Monthly backup was bad. And finally an off site backup from several months ago was finally found good. We tested backups once a quarter after that. It took all of an hour to do it.

Comment Re:"AI as a way to trim their staffing" (Score 1) 101

I think you glossed over an important bit. I am assuming you reviewed the code and understood in detail what it did. Made sure the edge cases were considered, the code could be extended, was maintainable, and test coverage was good. You can't just get that knowledge by using AI alone and I have already seen some spectacular failures from AI code put into production without the development team really understanding what it does. As a productivity improvement I think AI makes sense along with the long line of other less splashy things like IDE improvements. But I think there will start to be some really public failures as some companies cut corners and hire people who just barely know what is happening and use AI. And this is not really new in general as for years I have been brought in behind development teams that were not smart or did not have enough experience to fix things in production on fire as a result.

Comment I have worked for a company like this (Score 1) 72

Jassy fosters this kind of behavior and then freaks out, because he is getting what he wants. Sometimes when you get when you want and you make your own company a battleground you find out that it is not the best for your company. By his own admission, the current way to get ahead at amazon is to create a fiefdom.

Comment Re:AI coders are not coders (Score 1) 159

I lived through the offshoring programmer push in the 90s and I expect this is already starting to go like that. Hire bottom dollar to crank out some code you have no idea what it does. Put it in production and it explodes in their face and do the clown car scramble to get people who actually know what they are doing to fix it and pay through the nose. It would have been much much cheaper to just hire the good Developers to build the system, but at this point it is sunk cost. And the MBAs who made the original stupid decisions have all moved on so probably most of them won't suffer the consequences.

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