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A desktop made for one

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191–200 of 281 posts

Re: A desktop made for one

#191

Post by lpcvoid »

lionkor wrote: post #178

CHasm[0] is a bit of a joke, right? Did it take a lot of Claude massaging to get it to ignore basic engineering knowledge, like that compilers write better assembly than any other tool or person will (in the general case, which this is)? This kind of summarizes the whole post for me. I struggle to see how, on a platform that I thought was passionate about engineering, this is gaining any kind of traction. Writing GUI…

I agree. I have no idea why this story is upvoted. Hacker culture is truely dead, it's all slop now.

Re: A desktop made for one

#192

Post by Havoc »

I like this as a concept & have been pushing towards similar (though more in homelab/webapp space than desktop).

In particular I've found that if you have a good infrastructure layer available on which you can deploy then it's much easier to throw small purpose built webtools on there that solves personal problems. Infra here being fixed IP, mTLS reverse proxy, k3s/container, S3 etc. Basic building blocks like that - store data, run app & safe gateway to access it.

If you have that in place then most smaller apps (shopping list, notes etc) is a couple prompts away

Re: A desktop made for one

#193

Post by theshrike79 »

nz wrote: post #81
Agingcoder wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed I’ve already started writing software for myself using Claude. I would never have done this if it weren’t for AI - I simply don’t have the time otherwise . I now have tailor made apps with all kinds of bells and whistles that commercial products can’t offer easily ( I fall under non commercial usage which opens a lot of doors ), and that free software might offer, but later. I have also learnt a lot technicall…

I don't know how to tell you this, but people have been writing custom software for personal use for decades. I've been doing it since at least 2009! I find it hard to believe that there is a demographic of people that were yearning to write code, but simply could not because they lacked LLMs. Is it the price? Are people simply too cheap to buy books? Or have they simply "forgotten" how to patiently and thoughtfully…

I have written multiple IRC bots in the last 20+ years. It's my go-to project to test a new language, mostly because I know the protocol inside and out and it has some gotchas that languages can't handle comfortably (managing a bunch of open TCP sockets with threads/subprocesses mostly).

Have I tried to write my own IRC client yet? Nope. Because even though I know how to, the time spent wouldn't have been worth it. Getting from zero to feature parity would've taken me weeks or months of evenings doing nothing else.

I've got my own irccloud/thelounge clone running now, took me two weeks of calendar time and I spent maybe 6-7 evenings on it and a few hare-brained ideas with Claude on my phone.

The amount of "lubrication" LLMs have given me in going from idea to something good enough just for me is completely bonkers.

Re: A desktop made for one

#194

Post by theshrike79 »

skydhash wrote: post #125
vessenes wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since roughly 1995 or so we've been in a world where quality tooling was provided by on the order of 1,000s of developers, mostly open source. GNU, Xorg, Apache, emacs, nginx, and so on. Or you could opt in to the Microsoft ecosystem. The ~20 years prior to that we were in a world where you chose to align with either Microsoft's tooling, IBM, or shops providing Unix tooling from proprietary vendors. I elide a nearly…

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?

If others have built a whole-ass house and I just occasionally need the kitchen table I had to just deal with the hassle of having a whole house and just used the table. And even the table was the wrong shape, but I could deal with it. Asking the Others to make the table modifiable would've been a massive effort of PRs and mailing lists I didn't want to get into.

Now I can build a bespoke table in an evening or two and it fits my stuff just perfectly.

I could do it before too, but it would've taken too long for me to bother, so I dealt with the whole house along with the table.

Re: A desktop made for one

#195

Post by theshrike79 »

stateofinquiry wrote: post #126
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…

Interesting points. With the extreme cheapening of the cost (time/skill) for software production, we can have "Extremely Personal Software", as you mention and as demonstrated by the source. I wonder if we will reach a stage where "software" is written by a computer for an audience of 1 and for a single task, to be run once only- via an interface that works for all tasks. The very concept of software as something tha…

More likely we'll have a library of skeletons for single task software, where the LLM can fill in the blanks as needed.

Maybe it saves the script locally (invisible to the user) and reuses it if the user repeats the same request, the script is deleted if it's not needed for X amount of time.

Re: A desktop made for one

#196

Post by theshrike79 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #54
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 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.

Not everyone's "personal software" runs on a publicly accessible host on the internet.

I trust my Browser, OS and file system too.

But I'm also pretty sure none of the bespoke software I have will get any kind of security implications. The chance of my own file manager having a buffer overflow RCE triggered by a random file is practically zero.

Re: A desktop made for one

#197

Post by theshrike79 »

Havoc wrote: post #192

I like this as a concept & have been pushing towards similar (though more in homelab/webapp space than desktop). In particular I've found that if you have a good infrastructure layer available on which you can deploy then it's much easier to throw small purpose built webtools on there that solves personal problems. Infra here being fixed IP, mTLS reverse proxy, k3s/container, S3 etc. Basic building blocks like that -…

I like the simonw tools approach: https://tools.simonwillison.net/

Basically you have a repo with web-based tools and a way to deploy them on change. Then you can just quickly whip up (or ask an LLM to do so) any simple tool and it's live within minutes.

Re: A desktop made for one

#198

Post by theshrike79 »

blks wrote: post #171
senbrow wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just doesn't matter for a lot of us. We have LLMs that can tweak it and the tools work as intended. The whole point of this sentiment is that the personal tools wouldn't EXIST due to the time sink needed. The tradeoff makes sense for a lot of people even if it's not a good fit for you.

I don’t think the time sink is that significant with many tools, especially since you can take existing projects and change them. And it’s fun to hack!

You might find it fun to hack. Others don't.

Also I don't want to take someone's existing project and change it. They have too much cruft and don't work Just The Way I Like It.

That's why we create custom stuff from scratch.

Re: A desktop made for one

#199

Post by theshrike79 »

soraminazuki wrote: post #117
Kalabasa wrote: post #84

One term for these is "home-cooked" software. https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software

"Home" as in "phoning home"? Because Claude Code sure isn't local, privacy-respecting software.

No, but you can (and should) use VC-funded AIs to create local privacy-respecting software that will keep working when the bubble bursts.

Re: A desktop made for one

#200

Post by theshrike79 »

lionkor wrote: post #174
paweladamczuk wrote: post #133

What about the cybersecurity aspect of bespoke software? A cybersecurity research company can now spend a small fortune on finding zero days in iOS because of the amount of people that use it. It basically guarantees there will be clients like government agencies willing to pay through the nose for the exploits. Software made for one might disrupt this business model.

Software made for one, made by LLMs which regurgitate the average of existing tools, are going to have more security issues, not less.

But how would you exploit them when every one of them is subtly different?

With software that's deployed to millions of computers you have an abundance of targets, but trying to target some random LLM average todo list at scale is hard, isn't it?

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