This seems like an overly reductive worldview. Do you really think there isn't genuine interest in LLM tools among developers? I absolutely agree there are people pushing AI in places where it is unneeded, but I have not found software development to be one of those areas. There are lots of people experimenting and hacking with LLMs because of genuine interest and perceived value.
At my company, there is absolutely no mandate for use of AI tooling, but we have a very large number of engineers who are using AI tools enthusiastically simply because they want to. In my anecdotal experience those who do tend to be much better engineers than the ones who are most skeptical or anti-AI (though its very hard to separate how much of this is the AI tooling, and how much is that naturally curious engineers looking for new ways to improve inevitably become better engineers who don't).
The broader point is, I think you are limiting yourself when you immediately reduce AI to snake oil being sold by "business magnates". There is surely a lot of hype that will die out eventually, but there is also a lot of potential there that you guarantee you will miss out on when you dismiss it out of hand.
I use AI every day and run my own local models, that has nothing to do with seeing sales people acting like sales people or conmen being con artists.
Also add in the fact that big tech has been extremely damaging to western society for the last 20 years, there's really little reason to trust them. Especially since we see how they treat those with different opinions than them (trying to force them out of power, ostracize them publicly, or in some cases straight up poisoning people + giving them cancer).
Not really hard to see how people can be against such actions? Well buckle up bro, come post 2028 expect a massive crackdown and regulations against big tech. It's been boiling for quite a while and there's trillions of dollars to plunder for the public's benefit.
Thanks! I recommend not reading all comments literally. We have a significant hype bubble atm and I'm not exactly alone in thinking how crazy it is. I think you can draw a connection from my exasperated statement to that if you really wanted to.
You intentionally made disparaging remarks about someone and attempted to tie them having an opinion about a technology to that of people who have a vested financial interest in said technology.
You didn't engage at all on the substance of their comment - that they find AI useful for doing code reviews - and instead made a comment that was nothing but condescension.
All of that is separate from whether or not AI is overhyped or anything else - it being valuable for PRs could be true while it is also overhyped. If true, that could be some of the nuance you seem to be so concerned about us lacking.
You are missing their point. They are saying they start with relatively benign views, and the intense overreaction to those views drives them to support much more extreme views, like what you are describing, that they otherwise might not have.
I can't speak for Blow, but that definitely seems to accurately describe the arc Rowling has taken over the last 7-8 years.
> but that definitely seems to accurately describe the arc Rowling has taken over the last 7-8 years.
What a bizarre time we are living in when "men aren't women" and "women should have single-sex spaces and rape crisis centres" are considered extreme views.
Women who insist that they specifically get to decide who is or isn't a woman and what women believe aren't new. Phyllis Schlafly managed to ensure the Equal Rights Amendment didn't pass on this same basis. Phyllis would fly from city to city, addressing crowds of women to tell them that women should be at home looking after their kids, not um, flying from city to city making political addresses like she did...
Beware anyone who claims to represent "all" of some large diverse group, such as "Women" or "Floridians".
"Women should have single sex spaces" turns out to be used to justify, "It's OK to be hateful and even violent against women in these spaces so long as your excuse is that you believe they're not actually women" which is bullshit.
Years ago, when I wasn't too tired to spend all day and half the night dancing, I went to Bang Face Weekender - basically imagine a huge multi-room club night except for days and days. I keep the socials for it available because hey, it's a nice memory. This sort of "Single sex spaces" bullshit caused a problem for the last-but-one Bang Face because a new-to-this Security outfit somehow decided it's their job to go remove people who in their view weren't women from a toilet for women. These women weren't causing any problems for anybody else, but because they presumably had the wrong genitals or for some other reason were "suspect" to that Security team, Security dragged them out of a toilet cubicle and threw them out of the site. Other clubbers were of course horrified, and the event runners had to apologise to everybody - because regardless of how many X chromosomes you have, or whether you do or don't have a womb, dragging people out of the toilets because you've got weird ideas about what is or isn't a woman is batshit.
I am not missing their point at all, you are missing mine.
>drives them to support much more extreme views, like what you are describing, that they otherwise might not have.
The view I mentioned was the one that got Notch (one of the public figures mentioned by GP) the reaction from the internet in the first place. A bit disingenuous to say this was a moderate conservative talking point before he got sent spiraling into a far right abyss by an angry progressive mob.
I am not an expert on Notch's slide into craziness, but I'd argue that the episode you mention it might not be the start. His start was as a "anti-SJW" game developer which got him hated and vilified by his former fans.
I'm not saying these people were rays of sunshine before, I'm saying they could be talked to without them foaming at the mouth and you face palming at how unhinged they were. I was using the meaning of benign attached to tumors.
I think this is letting people off the hook. We're talking about adults in their 40s and 50s here. When people like that 'suddenly' endorse extreme views it's because they had held them back and feel enabled to say them now, an adult isn't going to become an extremist because someone was mean to them online.
I'm 20 years younger than Blow and even at my age I can tell I'm settled enough psychologically that adopting radically different views would require a lot of internal effort. Views don't exist in a vacuum, to believe radical things you have to radically alter all the other things you belief. I really don't think we should people like this like children without agency.
Thank you for saying this. In particular people are often already on a journey of self radicalisation so blaming people reacting to their views for radicalising them further is seeking to soft soap that. On top of which the people reacting are often framed as “going too far” and thus becoming more radical is the only natural reaction. It removes all agency and generally I think is mostly deployed by people that agree already with the radical views but are too scared to say so.
What are we going to do about those hate mobs in our societies in Western high culture who are so intolerant, intransigent and violent that they radicalise the moderates? I fear for the future. Any good ideas?
Microservices have nothing to do with the underlying hosting architecture. Microservices can all run and communicate on a single machine. There will be a local network involved, but it absolutely does require the internet or multiple machines.
It’s the equivalent of someone running on a platform where there would be world peace and no hunger.
That’s great and all as an ideal but realistically impossible so if you don’t have anything more substantial to offer then you aren’t really worth taking seriously.
Ironically, some of the worst tech debt I’ve ever dealt with has been because the initial implementation was an overengineered disaster by an dev who thought they were solving all possible problems before we really understood what all possible problems are.
“Zero tech debt” is an impossibility. The most elegant solutions incur some kind of tech debt, it’s just less than others. More realistic than “zero tech debt” is a continuing dedication to addressing tech debt combined with using implementations that minimize “one way doors”.
Are there other alternatives you have been looking at? I’m just getting started looking at these LLM gateways. I was under the impression that LiteLLM was pretty popular but you are not the only one here with negative things to say about it.
We are just now looking into LLM Gateways and LiteLLM was one I was considering looking into. I’m curious to hear more about what makes the code quality garbage.
I've deployed LiteLLM proxy in a number of locations and we're looking to swap it out (probably to Bifrost), we've seen many bugs with it that never should have made it to a release. Most stem from poor code quality or what I'd classify as poor development practises. It's also slow, it doesn't scale well and adds a lot of latency.
Bugs include but are not limited to multiple ways budget limits aren't enforced, parameter handling issues, configuration / state mismatches etc...
What makes this worse is if you come to the devs with the problem, a solution and even a PR it's very difficult to get them to understand or action it - let alone see critical things like major budget blowouts as a priority.
How do you like bugs where tools are not working, but only for Ollama provider and only when streaming is enabled? This is one of the real instances I had to debug with LiteLLM.
I personally had no issues using the client libs, my only complaint was that they only offer official Python ones would love to see them publish a typescript one
That doesn’t say anything about pushing people away from using products with AI though. People are enormously negative about the effects of social media, and yet social media use is incredibly pervasive and sticky.
Researchers have found that including the words “artificial intelligence” in product marketing is a major turn-off for consumers, suggesting a growing backlash and disillusionment with the tech — and that startups trying to cram “AI” into their product are actually making a grave error.
My point is that what people say and what people do are not the same thing. It may sound self-explanatory that if people don’t trust AI, they will avoid AI products, but I’m interested in data proving this. Self-reported attitudes regarding AI are not the same as customers actively avoiding products using AI.
I agree with your observation re. what people say/do. However, you know just as well as I do, that there's never studies/data of people avoiding stuff. How would you even go about proving a negative? So, let's turn this around: can you show me data that confirms people are enthusiastic to buy AI enhanced things? Data that confirm people's widespread acceptance and/or even preference of AI enhanced commodities?
There is no need for us random civilians to know the truth of these matters. Employees inside the company can see analytics that show whether the features are working or not.
At my company, there is absolutely no mandate for use of AI tooling, but we have a very large number of engineers who are using AI tools enthusiastically simply because they want to. In my anecdotal experience those who do tend to be much better engineers than the ones who are most skeptical or anti-AI (though its very hard to separate how much of this is the AI tooling, and how much is that naturally curious engineers looking for new ways to improve inevitably become better engineers who don't).
The broader point is, I think you are limiting yourself when you immediately reduce AI to snake oil being sold by "business magnates". There is surely a lot of hype that will die out eventually, but there is also a lot of potential there that you guarantee you will miss out on when you dismiss it out of hand.
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