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Software for One

ajwaxman.com

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Re: Software for One

#201

Post by stillpointlab »

Before I officially got into development as a career I had a manual labor job at a local business. They were debugging issues in their operations and brought in a consultant that wrote out workflows using FoxPro [1] a Database Management System (DBMS) that was similar to MS Access. These DBMS systems allowed non-technical people (like the consultant) to create quick and dirty forms-based apps.

I recall at the time (late 90s) these were popular dev platforms for regular folks. People would create fitness apps, time trackers, meal planners, etc. using WISYWIG interfaces and visual schema editors.

Of course, the 2000s, 2010s and 2020s were massive consolidation events with winner-takes-all SaaS eating the world.

My intuition here is that software for one is a temporary thing. Longevity has a quality of it's own, and eventually people just don't want to debug their own stuff. Sooner or later $5/month (or freemium) takes over.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FoxPro

Re: Software for One

#202

Post by embedding-shape »

latexr wrote: post #194
embedding-shape wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are you even talking about? No, of course music recommendation systems had nothing to do with LLMs two decades ago (which is obviously the crux of the discussion), that is insane. Of course not, but just some years ago, when people talked about "AI" in ML circles, they weren't exclusively talking about LLMs, which you seemed to have automatically and exclusively associated "AI" with. It's much larger than just…

So, in other words, you read what one person (you’re not talking to some vague notion of “people” in the past) wrote, associated it with other arguments you’ve seen (and quite possibly misinterpreted) before and decided to lump everything together and answer those different arguments and be kind of snarky about it. That attitude is exactly why online (and offline) discourse has gone in the gutter. Instead of addressi…

> than attacked that group instead

What on earth are you on about?

Take a breath, I'm not arguing for/against anything at all, I conceded myself it's "borderline off-topic", you don't have to take it as I'm trying to challenge anyone's worldview or anything, it's basically an offhand observation.

> man instead of straw manning.

You may not actually understand what a "straw man" is, as I haven't even attempted to refute or engage in any argumentation at all.

Anyway, clearly a fruitless conversation to continue, I'm not sure who you're arguing against/for here, I didn't intended to even try to argue against/for anything here, so I'm just gonna peace out. Hope you enjoy the rest of your Saturday as much as I've enjoyed mine so far!

Re: Software for One

#203

Post by Kuyawa »

I've been doing the same, building apps for myself, one per day, for stuff I only care, crypto stocks, baseball betting, medical ai assistant, gym trainer, pickleball rallies, raffles, coding assistants, some as full fledged apps, but lately as single page apps in plain html, css and js so I can use them anywhere, like a portable sudoku.html file you can drop anywhere and start playing

Re: Software for One

#204

Post by tptacek »

fuzzfactor wrote: post #153
tptacek wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I played a bunch of music while doing woodworking stuff and asked for more like that. Things like this are easy with a simple agent loop. It's not picking random music out of the sky; it's working from my Apple Music library (and then expanding on it from the Apple Music catalog).

>I played a bunch of music while doing woodworking stuff and asked for more like that. I would probably think about doing a little workspace sharing and ask for more live musicians to come in and do some serious woodshedding themselves ;) I know some that are getting that buzz-saw sound out of their instruments fairly repetitively already, and there's no place to go but up :)

I'm a terrible woodworker (that's what makes it fun) and if I had a musician in our basement shop there is a very high likelihood I would kill them, or at least seriously fuck up their instrument, when I manage to shoot a wooden spear across the room because of miter saw kickback.

Re: Software for One

#205

Post by monsieurbanana »

rpdillon wrote: post #199
YesBox wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people want the convenience of things just working at the tap or click of a button. LLMs are not going to change that.

I was talking to my wife about this a little bit, that the promise of computers has never really been realized in the sense that we don't put power in the hands of the end user. Like one of the most obvious things that a computer can do is run a task periodically at a time to go maybe fetch information and process it. And yet, the average computer user using any commercial operating system does not understand how to…

The average user can and already does that. If they want to regularly fetch their emails and process them, they will install outlook or use the Gmail web app. If they want to regularly fetch and install updates for their games they will install steam.

The "run a task periodically" isn't the difficult part, it's processing the data that is.

And to be honest I don't think llms will empower that many people, the vast majority don't want to put the effort required (and it's definitely more effort than writing a one-shot prompt)

Re: Software for One

#206

Post by [deleted] »

storus wrote: post #175

This is nice, but Apple essentially blocks sideloading (outside test flight environment) and Google is moving there as well. While it has never been easier to produce individualized software, it was never more difficult on the official platforms, unless one wants to create their own OS (at some point that might be possible as well).

[deleted]

Re: Software for One

#207

Post by bastawhiz »

I love this and agree with it so strongly. But I'm also shaken to my core that there's a $30/mo Neon bill for personal software. Even if it's being used for "slightly larger projects" as well that's a ton of overkill for what seems like mostly read only data.

I'm the sort of person who leans on Postgres instead of sqlite, but I'll put aside the sqlite argument for now because the fruit is so low hanging here. These use cases could probably work just fine with something far less robust. A redundant cluster of two db.t4g.micro RDS instances is ~$20/mo. But you probably don't even need that. Even just a container with a persistent volume seems like it would do the trick. With a little bit of caching, all of this could probably fit in the AWS DSQL free tier. And it brings me no joy to say that using AWS managed offerings is the operationally cheaper option.

I love Neon and think it's an incredible service, but this is some Heroku-ass pricing.

Re: Software for One

#208

Post by tptacek »

IanCal wrote: post #164
jedbrooke wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A personal music player for Apple Music with an embedded agent loop, so I can say things like "I'm going to work in the wood shop, play woodworking-appropriate music and keep the playlist full and non-repeating indefinitely". how is AI (or a human for that matter) supposed to know what “woodworking-appropriate music is”? I had the same thoughts when spotify released their “let AI make a playlist for you”. Like, we…

Recommendation algorithms are, frankly, weird as a user. Something watches your tiny interactions and, with zero concept of anything happening, gets surprisingly good at predicting your next interactions. It’d be like eating and having an alien with no concept of food or taste staring at how much your facial muscles change and making notes. Then recommending places to you based on the other people they’ve been studyi…

They are weird. But stuff like this solves one of my great challenges in life, which is that I've got many tens of thousands of songs in my library but only manage to hear tiny repetitive epicycles of them. I don't want a tight rotation of the same 200 songs, and I don't literally want to randomly walk my whole library, and I don't want to allocate lots of time curating exactly what I'm going to listen to. LLMs are great at this.

(Actually I totally do want to allocate lots of time curating exactly what I'm going to listen to, but laying out playlists is its own hobby, and woodworking time is for making wood shoot across my basement when I pinch the saw blade, not for making mixtapes.)

Re: Software for One

#209

Post by fallinditch »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #189
storus wrote: post #175

This is nice, but Apple essentially blocks sideloading (outside test flight environment) and Google is moving there as well. While it has never been easier to produce individualized software, it was never more difficult on the official platforms, unless one wants to create their own OS (at some point that might be possible as well).

What's the current state of web apps on IOS? Does Safari yet support local databases well enough to build useful web apps? Pretty much every app I can think of building for my family could just be a website iff local browser-resident persistent data was a thing. (And in some cases I wouldn't even need that if they were going to be always-online.)

I used dexie js from dexie.org to persist indexedDB, vendoring the script in a sidecar js file or inlining it - good for your iOS persistent local db, android too.

Re: Software for One

#210

Post by fragmede »

bastawhiz wrote: post #207

I love this and agree with it so strongly. But I'm also shaken to my core that there's a $30/mo Neon bill for personal software. Even if it's being used for "slightly larger projects" as well that's a ton of overkill for what seems like mostly read only data. I'm the sort of person who leans on Postgres instead of sqlite, but I'll put aside the sqlite argument for now because the fruit is so low hanging here. These u…

Shit, Cloudflare'd probably do it for free.
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