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

I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

blog.miguelgrinberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 221 posts

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#41

Post by ben_w »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #24
ctoth wrote: post #3

The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-dem…

> sense of pride and accomplishment What? Pride of what? What accomplishment?

> What? Pride of what? What accomplishment?

The sense of accomplishment does not necessarily require much accomplishment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#42

Post by zephen »

oytis wrote: post #39
ctoth wrote: post #3

The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-dem…

Who gets a sense of accoplishment from prompting an LLM? Do you get a sense of accomplishment when AI draws a picture or writes a poem for you? I guess there are some minds I'll never be able to comprehend

After trying and failing multiple times to get any LLM to create exactly the picture that I was trying to make, I have to admit that, at one point, if one of them had succeeded, I would have felt a quantum of accomplishment.

But, since I'm not that much of a slot machine aficionado, I just completely stopped pulling the lever.

However, I can see that for the right people, this level of difficulty might encode or mimic, purposely or not, many of the features that are collectively termed "gamification."

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#43

Post by doctorpangloss »

ctoth wrote: post #3

The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-dem…

it's called plugins, lots of end user facing OSS have vibrant plugin ecosystems.

maintainers like the sense of power and it's not really more complicated than that. perfectly valid emotion to chase!

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#44

Post by mostlysimilar »

senordevnyc wrote: post #35
mostlysimilar wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does matter. Drawing a stick figure and having a machine print over it with a realistic image doesn't make you an artist, and no, you shouldn't be proud of it.

Or we could, you know, let people feel proud of whatever they want?

Call me old fashioned but I take pride in things I work hard to achieve. I think it's embarrassing to be proud of AI output of any kind, be it software or art or writing.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#45

Post by iainctduncan »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #32

This blog post had serious "old man yells at cloud" vibes for me.

nope, it's an old man yelling get off my lawn. And as a fellow old person with an open source lawn, I 100% sympathize.

My lawn == I'm not wasting any of my dwindling old man time on bullshit people vomit out. You want to do that, you fork and leave me out.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#46

Post by oytis »

kvark wrote: post #4

We had a process at one company where you had to create an issue before filing a PR. I found it most non-sensical and introducing friction for no good reason. Very surprised to see the author suggesting it in the article. Review is indeed the main bottleneck now for open source, and we need to solve it. Introducing more friction is hardly helping.

Are there other companies? Where you are submitting PRs that solve no known problem?

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#47

Post by jackp96 »

Trasmatta wrote: post #25
ctoth wrote: post #3

The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-dem…

> The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. There was nothing stopping them from making software before... Over the past ~15 years, the amount of resources to learn programming, and to make the whole process approa…

I mean, I largely agree with the sentiment (friction is important for growth/happiness, after all). But even as a developer, I'm able to quickly whip up custom personal apps that I just wouldn't be able to justify the time for previously.

Our CEO just took a design mock-up of a new landing page and threw it into Fable, and it spit out an objectively better iteration of the component's design. The hierarchy made more sense, the typography was more polished, and it naturally incorporated some elements we hadn't added yet.

We won't implement everything it changed of course, but it's the first time I've seen a model take a decent draft of a webpage mockup and improve it in a way that feels like a more evolved version of the original instead of just LLM-ifying it.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#48

Post by jrm4 »

ctoth wrote: post #3

The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-dem…

I do a bit in my IT classes where I show a "spectrum" of computer activities, from "changing a screensaver" to "Assembly" and then challenge people to find the line where "using a computer" stops and "programming a computer" starts.

It was already very fuzzy (Excel?). Soon, this line be non-existent.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#49

Post by WorldMaker »

tehjoker wrote: post #2

To respond to the ending of this piece, I think open source still matters because LLMs generate very specific code for a specific situation. Quality libraries mean solutions can be reliably shared between projects.

But how do you tell quality libraries from LLM generated ones? How do you even discover up quality libraries if you are leaving so many code decisions to LLMs? Once the LLMs train on your quality libraries how do you stop so many copies just getting pasted into people's code without your attribution and without directing people back to your library (and your very human interests in funding development on it or getting copyleft contributions back to it)?

I think there are so many hard questions right now for "Does open source even matter any more?" and many of those questions seem particularly demotivating to me right now, especially because we don't seem to be at risk of getting some, much less better, answers any time soon.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#50

Post by troupo »

awhitty wrote: post #14
dude250711 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they shoot a little artistic clip with their nice modern iPhone camera, it does not mean they get to insert it into a Hollywood movie.

This analogy makes no sense to me and honestly skews pretty elitist in vibe. iPhone is regularly used in professional videography now. Like, 28 Years Later was shot on iPhone. Indie filmmakers have been using iPhone to break into the industry for years.

"You are not a photographer just because you have a camera" has been a standard saying since forever, and has nothing to do with elitism.

Those professionals are professionals not because they own an iPhone and use it to shoot something.

Post reply on HN