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With AI you need to think bigger

rodyne.com

151–160 of 182 posts

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#151
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm old enough to remember when they first said that about the Internet. We were going to enter a new enlightened age of information, giving everyone access to the sum total of human knowlege, no need to get a fancy degree, universities will be obsolete, expertise will be democratized.... See how that turned out.

I’d suggest we are much closer to that reality now than we were in the 90s, in large part thanks to the internet.

Since the Internet became ubiquitous, more people believe the moon landing, climate change, and vaccines are hoaxes.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with ChatGPT is underwhelming. It does really basic language questions faster and easier than google now. Questions about a function signature or questions like, "how do I get the first n characters of a string". Things like that. Once I start asking it more complex questions not only does it get it wrong often, if you tell it the answer is wrong and ask to do it again it will often give you the same an…

What language are you writing? I mostly write go these days, and have often wondered if it is uniquely good in that language given its constraints.

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Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#153
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d suggest we are much closer to that reality now than we were in the 90s, in large part thanks to the internet.

Since the Internet became ubiquitous, more people believe the moon landing, climate change, and vaccines are hoaxes.

LLMs and the internet both make it easier for us to access more information, which also means we can reach dumber conclusions quicker. It does go both ways though.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#154
post #92

Where are the LLM leaderboards for software estimation accuracy? I have been using Claude Code and Aider and I do think they provide incredibly exciting potential. I can spin up new projects with mind boggling results. And, I can start projects in domains where I previously had almost no experience. It is truly exciting. AND... The thing I worry most about is that now non-technical managers can go into Claude and say…

> I can spin up new projects with mind boggling results Boggle a skeptical mind

I wanted a whiteboard app - simple, infinite, zoomable, scrollable svg-based area with custom shapes and elements. It just needed prompts like "add zoom", "add a rect shape", "add control points for resize", "add text shape", "make position attributes able to reference another objects properties, + basic arithmetic" (for example to make line connect 2 objects, or size of one mirror size of another, etc.). It made all of these with so little effort from me. I would never undertake such a project without an LLM.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#155
post #86
post #24

I recently discovered that some of the Raspberry Pi models support the Linux Kernel's "Gadget Mode". This allows you to configure the Pi to appear as some type of device when plugged into a USB port, i.e. a Mass Storage/USB stick, Network Card, etc. Very nifty for turning a Pi Zero into various kinds of utilities. When I realized this was possible, I wanted to set up a project that would allow me to use the Pi as a b…

Fun fact: Gadget mode also works on Android phones, if you want a programmable USB device that you can easily program and carry around I made a PoC of a 2FA authenticator (think Yubikey) that automatically signs you in. I use it for testing scenarios when I have to log out and back in many times, it flies through what would otherwise be a manual 2FA screen with pin entry, or navigating 2FA popups to select passkey an…

This answers a question I didn't realize I had. I had already been thinking about some kind of utility gadget made up of a Pi Zero with a tiny screen and battery, but an Android phone solves a lot of problems in one go.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#156
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my more effective uses of AI is for rubber duck debugging. I tell it what I want the code to do, iterate over what it comes back with, adjust the code ( 'now rewrite foo() so 'bar' is is passed in'). What comes back isn't necessarily perfect and I don't blindly copy and paste but that isn't the point. At the end I've worked out what I want to do and some of the tedious boiler-plate code is taken care of.

I've tried it, and ended up with the completely wrong approach, which didn't take that long to figure out, but still wasted a good half hour. Would have been horrible if i didn't know what I was doing though.

Yes, that's one of the bigger traps. In my case I knew what needed to be done and could've done it on my own if I really needed to.

A novice with no idea could blunder through but get lost quickly.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#157

I had a minor desire to make a feature that had a slightly higher effort than reward, so although I knew I could struggle it out I didn't bother. After years of this I decided to give an AI a shot at the code. It produced something plausible looking and I was excited. Was it that easy? The code didn't work. But the approach made me more motivated to look into it and I found a solution. So although the AI gave me crap…

> I decided to give an AI What model? What wrapper? There's just a huge amount of options on the market right now, and they drastically differ in quality. Personally, I've been using Claude Code for about a week (since it's been released) and I've been floored with how good it is. I even developed an experimental self-developing system with it.

I prefer open source models.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#158
post #24

I recently discovered that some of the Raspberry Pi models support the Linux Kernel's "Gadget Mode". This allows you to configure the Pi to appear as some type of device when plugged into a USB port, i.e. a Mass Storage/USB stick, Network Card, etc. Very nifty for turning a Pi Zero into various kinds of utilities. When I realized this was possible, I wanted to set up a project that would allow me to use the Pi as a b…

That gives me ideas.

I think a lot of the reason linux isn't used for lots of things is that you have to basically be a sysadmin to set up some things.

for example, setting up a local LLM.

I wonder what you would call getting a "remote" AI to help set up a local AI?

Something like but not exactly emancipation or emigration or ...

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#159
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d suggest we are much closer to that reality now than we were in the 90s, in large part thanks to the internet.

Since the Internet became ubiquitous, more people believe the moon landing, climate change, and vaccines are hoaxes.

Is it really that much worse today? When I was a kid, my great aunt died of skin cancer. She was a Christian Scientist and rejected medical treatment in favour of prayer.

As a teenager, I remember being annoyed that the newspapers had positive articles on the rejuvenating properties of nonsense like cupping and reiki. At least a few of my friends' parents had healing crystals.

People have always believed in whatever nonsense they want to believe.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#160
Claude gave me the confidence to setup a router using the relatively obscure VyOS network stack. It was a lot of back and forth. The syntax has changed quite a bit between versions and Claude kept giving me out of date code. I would reply with the error message and snippets of the current documentation and it would try again. Things eventually worked. Perhaps it was a bit of a "stone soup" situation, but I would not have attempted the project without the assistance of an LLM.
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