Too true. Even on the software side i see people blindly “claude make it faster with no mistakes” and gushing about it when the output is genuinely not good not because claude isnt good but because the user of it isnt.
We got a new a CNC machine and everyone is carving away marveling at how easily it chips away at metal when the result is a jagged mess.
Yeah but theres also no null test here. He might have done anything and still been successful. He might have done something else more optimal and done even better. We can't really tell from a single anecdote.
It's really quite interesting how many HNers hate AI; which is odd, considering the zeitgeist of this community. It may even be more intense than the Apple-hatred.
Hate marketing BS and wealth extraction? Absolutely.
I see OpenAI, Anthropic, etc (the whole LLM-hype/boom) leaning far more towards being the latter than the former, in which context the dislike makes perfect sense.
I don’t hate it. I just hate the cult-like enthusiasm for it and the associated false claims. Again, your isolated anecdote does not trump the carefully compiled data presented in this post.
We get way too hung up on data; especially when it reinforces our personal bias.
Some time ago, I had a discussion here, where I mentioned that the average commute time from the suburban community in which I live, to downtown Manhattan, was generally 90 minutes to two and a half hours.
This was based on purely anecdotal data. That data includes the daily news on the radio and TV, which considers commutes from suburbs, important enough to dedicate significant airtime.
It was attacked, because some organization published some statistics, that said the average suburban commute time was 27 minutes. I was told that I was exaggerating, and being overly negative.
Here's a math word problem:
Harry lives 25 miles, as the crow flies, from his destination. However, the roads make it 40 miles.
Of those roads, 10 miles are suburban side roads that Harry needs to take, to get to the highway. The average speed is 25 MpH.
Once Harry hits the highway, though, the real fun begins. It's stop-and-go traffic (20MpH) for 28 miles. Once he gets to the city, he needs to navigate another 2 miles, through the most God-awful traffic on Earth, to where he needs to drive around for up to a half hour, looking for a parking space.
How does Harry make the drive in 27 minutes?
A fairly significant number of folks just took that ridiculous statistic, and were quite comfortable, calling me a liar, based on it. It was kind of jaw-dropping; considering the types of folks that we have, here.
That sounds a bit more "cultish" than we might be comfortable acknowledging.
> We get way too hung up on data; especially when it reinforces our personal bias.
While I don't disagree that we generally get too hung up on data, "It's a problem when the data matches the hypothesis" is an odd blanket interpretation of the scientific method.
I'm confused, your rebuttal to statistics is another anecdote? Was the quoted statistics limited to car commute or includes public transport? Your commute may be long, but it may not represent the average as well. Maybe it's a sign to switch away from cars instead?
Anecdotes are poor because it is highly context dependent. You had to make a long description of Harry to make your point, and yet it has not, to my mind, disproved the statistics, though I would like the source to the stats myself if you could provide it, thanks.
The commute only takes 27 minutes if we ignore that everybody else has an LLM- erh, car I mean.
Think you’re clever because your LLM contacts 100 businesses? Imagine 100000 businesses doing the same thing. You’ve just eradicated human support, because nobody’s going to sit through this BS bot future. Good luck when you get auto-flagged for some reason and there’s not a single human to revert or care.
No, my point is LLMs are machines designed to create responses to prompts that pass as plausibly human and intelligent. They are working as designed here. The fact that they get stuff right on occasion doesn't change that what it is at it's core is a randomness generator.
Kidding of course. It could be that he's an expert in his domain and can quickly ascertain whether the results are quality. It may also save a lot of time and be the best modern heuristic process.
I certainly will never need to write code anymore, and I can judge the output of these agentic processes. Same thing.
* what he perceives to be actionable BI.