Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I think I need to go lie down

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 475 posts

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#311

Post by insanitybit »

gchamonlive wrote: post #215
JanneVee wrote: post #184

I feel old now. I'm fairly sure that we could do this almost as fast with VB or Delphi a couple of decades ago, but a little more deterministic results instead of having the tool inferring it from the label names. We had this and then we shoved everything in the browser and forgot that we could do this without using huge amount of compute of some generative AI model. Look at me I'm old yelling at clouds!

There was a reason why we moved away from this. Everything is code, the UIs for creating such interfaces are just abstractions. The code generated by those no-code approaches to interface design was horrible and would break down quite fast in larger projects. Maintainability for such interfaces was non-existent. I think just regretting an old feature long gone without proper context is dangerous. If we are to bring b…

I don't use these tools (I do backend dev), so perhaps I'm mistaken, but the benefits here are, I assume,

a) For UX people who have minimal programming knowledge but need to produce mockups.

b) For people like me who might want a basic UX to start with for demo purposes.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#312

Post by jayd16 »

tsunamifury wrote: post #209
sarchertech wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate it when designers present what looks like polished and complete UIs in Figma. To the execs it looks like a finished product which frequently creates unreasonable expectations that interfere with what should be the iterative nature of UI design. I don’t know how many times I’ve come across a project where a terrible system design was foisted on a group of engineers because of the constraints required by a Figma…

I hate it with engineers complain moan and drag their feet on implementations that are hard but worth it. Because really under the surface they just don’t like doing something new, even if it has clearly defined user and business value.

I suspect you're on the wrong side of town for a comment like this, haha.

Almost always its just conflicting requests. Every ticket has a clearly defined user and business value to the person who wrote it.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#313

Post by insanitybit »

goodpoint wrote: post #301
JanneVee wrote: post #184

I feel old now. I'm fairly sure that we could do this almost as fast with VB or Delphi a couple of decades ago, but a little more deterministic results instead of having the tool inferring it from the label names. We had this and then we shoved everything in the browser and forgot that we could do this without using huge amount of compute of some generative AI model. Look at me I'm old yelling at clouds!

And don't forget this stunt took some kilos of Co2 released in the atmosphere to run the AI.

My laptop from multiple years ago (6GB VRAM) can run local models with decent performance. It's my understanding that the major energy cost is from training the models, which you do somewhat infrequently, and that generation isn't nearly as costly.

Someone who knows more, please correct me if I'm wrong!

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#315

Post by city41 »

JanneVee wrote: post #184

I feel old now. I'm fairly sure that we could do this almost as fast with VB or Delphi a couple of decades ago, but a little more deterministic results instead of having the tool inferring it from the label names. We had this and then we shoved everything in the browser and forgot that we could do this without using huge amount of compute of some generative AI model. Look at me I'm old yelling at clouds!

I'm also reminded of Steve Jobs's Interface Builder demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl0CbKYUFTY&t=70s

I still think it's impressive that AI can just look at 2 rectangles and discern slider though.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#316

Post by fallingknife »

andai wrote: post #297
quest88 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to talk about today's sponsor, Squarespace. (in Jest, I know it doesn't solve every problem!)

I used to look down on it but when I heard it handles payment it blew my mind and I decided I'd rather use it myself if I ever make a shop instead of building it myself. To quote a random guy "I trust their code more than what I wrote at 2am."

I am a SWE. When I needed a website for a small business I was running, I used squarespace too. If you just need a static public facing site it's absolutely great.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#317

Post by Zetobal »

lakpan wrote: post #270
pclmulqdq wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toward the end of its life, Dreamweaver's code was quite readable. Webflow today is kind of an equivalent, and also puts out relatively readable HTML. I think most of the reputation comes from people looking at its early output.

I’d say nobody who “hand crafts” code finds any generated code readable. AI almost puts a dent in that, but even that often produces really ugly code.

People also produce really ugly code.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#318

Post by nick222226 »

Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #232
saddlerustle wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gpt4-turbo api is now deterministic

It isn’t. It’s “mostly deterministic,” whatever that means. https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/text-generation/repr...

From the link: Sometimes, determinism may be impacted due to necessary changes OpenAI makes to model configurations on our end. To help you keep track of these changes, we expose the system_fingerprint field. If this value is different, you may see different outputs due to changes we've made on our systems.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#319

Post by rchaud »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #295
rchaud wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've put into words what has bothered me about the relentless boosterism of B2C AI solutions on the backs of hundreds of these "Hello World" type demos. "OMG, programming is dead!" The strange thing is that on HN, the limits of these approaches re: extensibility and maintenance are easily recognized when talking about traditional no-code platforms. But somehow with AI, these problems are now fixed, and we wont have…

Do you really care about extensibility and maintenance when you could just generate an entirely new component when you want more features or need to upgrade the library?

If the team that came up with the prototype assumes that responsibility, then no, I don't. I'm sure an AI will understand how to refactor the codebase on an adhoc basis without creating any problems down the line.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#320

Post by brundolf »

JanneVee wrote: post #184

I feel old now. I'm fairly sure that we could do this almost as fast with VB or Delphi a couple of decades ago, but a little more deterministic results instead of having the tool inferring it from the label names. We had this and then we shoved everything in the browser and forgot that we could do this without using huge amount of compute of some generative AI model. Look at me I'm old yelling at clouds!

It has nothing to do with the browser, it has to do with how opinionated your framework is.

VB was highly opinionated; it made native windows-style UIs and nothing else. Nobody was taking arbitrary mockups from designers, with a wildly custom look-and-feel, and replicating them down to the pixel in VB.

Today, most product GUIs are part of the brand. For better or worse, every company wants a distinctive look and feel and set of UI behaviors. This requires the tools used to build them to be much more complicated.

You could replicate VB in a browser. Many people have done roughly that. But nobody uses them to build products, because their company doesn't want boring/generic UIs.

Post reply on HN