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A desktop made for one

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Re: A desktop made for one

#161

Post by zelphirkalt »

jpease wrote: post #66
sandworm101 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I shudder to think about the security implications of everyone rolling thier own software. I trust my OS/browser/file system is secure because thousands of people are invovled in a complex network of interests in keeping it secure, from the kid contributing his first bit of code to the PHds at NSA writing encryption standards. The idea that any one person can replace that network is laughable.

Just to be contrarian, perhaps some measure of risk is reduced by the scale of one. Identifying a vulnerability that can be exploited against many thousands or millions of targets is perhaps more attractive than a single one of individually low value. This of course would assume that vulnerabilities are in fact unique (which is admittedly questionable).

If a vulnerability of the common not individualized ancestor software is found, how quickly do people patch their individual versions of the software?

Re: A desktop made for one

#162

Post by debugnik »

wyclif wrote: post #103
mrob wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still vaguely remember how difficult man pages were to understand when I first started reading them. I'm pretty sure the biggest obstacle is the fact that most documentation is written for people who already know the standard computer science terminology. I have a generally negative opinion of LLMs, but one thing they do very well is function as a "reverse dictionary". You can input a idiosyncratic description of s…

I've commented on this subject before, but the fact of the matter is that kids getting into high tech and programming mostly don't read books anymore. How do I know? Recently I was hanging out with a bunch of high school students who asked me how I learned. I said it was mostly via books and man pages. "Yeah, don't sleep on high quality written material. O'Reilly. Wiley. Addison-Wesley. Manning. MIT. No Starch Press.…

Already in 2008, as a millennial teen without internet at home, I was learning C# and XNA without a single book, just tutorials and official docs I downloaded from the library alongside Visual Studio Express. I couldn't have afforded books on it anyway, but I can't imagine teens in 2026 using anything other than Youtube and some tutorials to learn this stuff.

Re: A desktop made for one

#163

Post by pamcake »

redfloatplane wrote: post #22

I (and I'm sure many others) have been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of months. I called it "Extremely Personal Software" in a blog post a few months ago ( https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/14-releasing-software-now/ ) but there are lots of names and concepts floating about for the same basic idea. I think it's possible the amount of new software that will be written for an audience of 1-10 will be grea…

I think I agree. But at the same time we have strength in numbers and people will find something close to what they want and fork off that.

So I think the same thesis holds for audiences of 10-100 and 100-1000.

A cambrian explosion of software.

Re: A desktop made for one

#164

Post by sandworm101 »

jzb wrote: post #115
sandworm101 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I shudder to think about the security implications of everyone rolling thier own software. I trust my OS/browser/file system is secure because thousands of people are invovled in a complex network of interests in keeping it secure, from the kid contributing his first bit of code to the PHds at NSA writing encryption standards. The idea that any one person can replace that network is laughable.

If they’re hosting network services, sure. I wouldn’t put vibe-coded software outside a home network, ever. But it seems low risk if people are just creating their own desktop software: especially since it’s less likely to be vulnerable to widespread malware. (Note: I’m not an LLM fan, don’t vibe code myself at all. But I would be unconcerned about security for the kind of things I would create if I did start doing s…

But your browser will invite outside software into your network, to run on your machine. So you have to be up to speed with community knowledge.

Re: A desktop made for one

#166

Post by dimator »

theshrike79 wrote: post #154
dimator wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read somewhere (in the myriad blog posts dealing with this Cambrian LLM explosion) that software developers could be put into two camps: those that just want the thing to exist, and those that want to build and understand the thing (in addition to wanting it to exist). those in the first camp are having a great time. those in the second camp (which is how you're describing yourself, and how I'd describe myself) are…

I kinda like the woodworking analogy of this. I, in theory, can plane a piece of wood with a hand planer. But I'll never do it again, we did it at school in ye olden times before the millennium and it was boring then as it is boring now. I know people who get satisfaction from it, they take one sliver off with the hand planer, feel the wood with their hand and figure out the perfect angle for the next tiny sliver of…

Your analogy is not really apples to apples though, is it?

More close is: if there was a table making machine, you just push a button and something like a table comes out, would you still be a woodworker? You haven't planed, nor measured, nor cut, nor jointed, you've only pressed on "make me a table"

Re: A desktop made for one

#167

Post by Ygg2 »

utopiah wrote: post #152
redfloatplane wrote: post #22

I (and I'm sure many others) have been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of months. I called it "Extremely Personal Software" in a blog post a few months ago ( https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/14-releasing-software-now/ ) but there are lots of names and concepts floating about for the same basic idea. I think it's possible the amount of new software that will be written for an audience of 1-10 will be grea…

I called it "software". It's so strange to me that since the 1960s with BASIC then later on dozens of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_educational_programmin... including Logo by Feurzeig/Papert/Solomon there is effort to precisely help beginners program software. The effort was not to onboard future professional software developers but rather to make the personal in personal computer, or PC, meaningful. It's YO…

> It's YOUR computer, you can put YOUR software on it. In fact even pocket calculator do that.

I'm pretty sure this exists. It's called OSS or, more ubiquitously, Linux.

The problem is, of course, no one wants to publish software for your PC/handmade OS. Which makes it a huge problem. You can't write every piece of your OS, without wasting huge amount of time. Nor do people generally want this.

Re: A desktop made for one

#168

Post by yuye »

theshrike79 wrote: post #154
dimator wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read somewhere (in the myriad blog posts dealing with this Cambrian LLM explosion) that software developers could be put into two camps: those that just want the thing to exist, and those that want to build and understand the thing (in addition to wanting it to exist). those in the first camp are having a great time. those in the second camp (which is how you're describing yourself, and how I'd describe myself) are…

I kinda like the woodworking analogy of this. I, in theory, can plane a piece of wood with a hand planer. But I'll never do it again, we did it at school in ye olden times before the millennium and it was boring then as it is boring now. I know people who get satisfaction from it, they take one sliver off with the hand planer, feel the wood with their hand and figure out the perfect angle for the next tiny sliver of…

I don't think the analogy works. You're focusing on the "how", not the "what". Using a mechanical planer, you still need to dial in numbers yourself. You design your own table, the more modern tools just make it easier to realize your vision.

Another example: I enjoy writing with a good pen. But whether I write by pen or on a keyboard, it's still me writing it.

However, AI does basically all the real work, only leaving you to guide it. Make a table? AI gives you one with 2 legs. More legs? Guess I can live with 5 legs.

And you wouldn't be making that table, AI is. You cannot have pride in something that you never made yourself. It's the same as 3D-printing something from Thingiverse and claiming you made it.

People who create AI blog posts are not writing. Those that prompt their way to a piece of software are not doing software engineering. The ones that generate AI images are not being artists.

Re: A desktop made for one

#169

Post by utopiah »

Ygg2 wrote: post #167
utopiah wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I called it "software". It's so strange to me that since the 1960s with BASIC then later on dozens of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_educational_programmin... including Logo by Feurzeig/Papert/Solomon there is effort to precisely help beginners program software. The effort was not to onboard future professional software developers but rather to make the personal in personal computer, or PC, meaningful. It's YO…

> It's YOUR computer, you can put YOUR software on it. In fact even pocket calculator do that. I'm pretty sure this exists. It's called OSS or, more ubiquitously, Linux. The problem is, of course, no one wants to publish software for your PC/handmade OS. Which makes it a huge problem. You can't write every piece of your OS, without wasting huge amount of time. Nor do people generally want this.

OSS/Linux is "our" software. It's made by us for us (or others if you don't contribute).

Your software can be made by you, for you. It can be open source/free software if you want. Others can contribute to it, if you want but it can be open source without accepting external contributions also.

My point was to highlight that having software made by you for your machine is not new. Arguably the way to do so changed but I would say the principle remains.

Re: A desktop made for one

#170

Post by blks »

josephg wrote: post #131
skydhash wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I don’t bother writing code this days is because my use cases have been solved, and if they weren’t, I’d tweak the most suitable candidate. One of my principles is to keep my workload small. More often than not, things starts with a small script or plugin, and then grow according to my needs. Why replicate what others have already done?

Because its fun. And because your experience using a tool is fundamentally different if you made it yourself, compared to if its something someone else made for you. I don't think I can explain the difference, but it feels really different. Even if you used claude.

It never felt fun for me to write software fully with LLMs. It feels disorientating, it produces a lot of code that you have no familiarity with and no authorship. It feels like you’re a teenager again, copy pasting code from internet or journal and hoping it will work.
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