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I Love the Computer

michaelenger.com

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Re: I Love the Computer

#121

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

lostmsu wrote: post #84
mid-kid wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The snake oil is how the people at the top scream "in x years we won't need programmers" and end up proving themselves wrong time and time again. It's a real technology and it can do a lot, but it's being sold like snake oil while we're still figuring out what it's actually useful for and how to leverage it properly.

> "in x years we won't need programmers" and end up proving themselves wrong time and time again This is how it looks in your head, maybe. But in reality since Sonnet 3.5 - when the whole "no need programmers" started - no "years" have passed. Sonnet 3.5 came out on June 20, 2024. We are still 5 days away from the lowest possible "years". So even if you quoted them literally, they could not have possibly proved thems…

The moronic "no need programmers" hype cycle happens every 15 years. We've all been here many times before.

Re: I Love the Computer

#122

Post by totallymike »

tptacek wrote: post #111
totallymike wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes perfect sense to me. Type in a prompt like “how can I make the cheese on my pizza stringier” and maybe it’ll tell you to use different cheeses, but maybe it’ll tell you to add glue. If you don’t like the answer, don’t worry, they’re building more data centers in poor neighborhoods so you can keep submitting the prompt until you get a better one.

What year is it, that you're getting frontier model responses saying to put glue in your pizza?

I trust that you can use your reading comprehension skills to understand that by referring to a famous example of LLMs producing garbage, I’m simply using it to illustrate the phenomenon at large, rather than to suggest that I am still struggling to find glue-free ways to make my pizza stringier.

If you still need help breaking down what I meant in the previous post, feel free to ask. Sentences can be tricky.

On a related note, just because Gemini doesn’t tell you to put glue in your pizza anymore, by no means implies that this particular problem is solved: https://www.404media.co/it-is-trivially-easy-to-use-reddit-t...

Re: I Love the Computer

#123

Post by keybored »

echelon wrote: post #30
anon7725 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I choose A. I know that many others choose A as well. A wonderful service known as the web has connected people who choose A with others who choose A and of course with a great many who don’t need to make a choice and benefit from the work of others. I mourn a world in which few will choose A, because for many to choose B seems to lock us all, tragedy of the commons style, into a worse world.

[flagged]

> This all feels so damned performative. These are irrational decisions.

Oh, it was meant to be rhetorical. Because everyone thinks like you?

Re: I Love the Computer

#124

Post by keybored »

AgentME wrote: post #8
fasterik wrote: post #2

I love computers too, but it doesn't resonate with me when people call AI "snake oil." The comparison suggests that the thing doesn't do what it's marketed to do. AI does more or less what it's marketed to do, sometimes badly. I still write code by hand. But LLMs have been a legitimately useful tool when I've wanted to dig into a new field like computer graphics, theoretical physics, or numerical analysis. Or even ju…

LLMs remind me of being a kid again being in wonder of all the possible things that could be done with a computer that haven't been figured out yet. The internet was relatively new and everyone had their own ideas of what that would enable. Fast forward to a few years ago and it was easy to believe that a lot of the low-hanging fruit of things an individual could do with the internet, apps, 3d graphics, etc, had been…

Nestlé can give us our daily allowance of baby formula and [AI corporation winner] can give us our daily allowance of free compute. These years will bring interesting times!

Re: I Love the Computer

#125

Post by lewisjoe »

Takes me back to the time where I would pickup any books that taught anything about computers/programming. I was too young to understand any of it, but the fact that there's this knowledge to be unlocked, that would then let me do new things with this white boxy device on my table top - was truly addictive.

I can't say the feeling remains because most new stuff that I learn now is not runnable on my machine now. Tech has gone back to the days when owning hardware that's capable of running the latest has become a costly affair.

Re: I Love the Computer

#126

Post by helloplanets »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #95
m463 wrote: post #73

Computers used to have unlimited promise and potential. then at some point, the balance started tipping. Things I specifically remember: - half life required you to register online to install your single-player game from CD - turbotax would only install on one computer. - software started rooting around on your system and uploading the findings - the iphone didn't let you install your own software - microsoft. enough…

At some point, we were the owners of the machine. More importantly, this was normal . We could do whatever we wanted, and the corporations just had to accept it. World changing technology. Limitless potential. Now it's the opposite. The computers belong to the corporations. They're just generously allowing us to use them, and only in ways that they profit off of. Computers, arguably humanity's most important inventio…

Computers started as massively costly, corporation / government only mainframes, that much is clear. They've been productivity machines from the get go, they've been machines made for war.

What computers "are" has been ebbing and flowing decade after decade. They've been repurposed to something that they initially weren't. It was originally niche, and not at all the norm.

Then, there was a brief period when counter culture was pop culture. That was reflected in everything in the 90's, from music to computers.

Re: I Love the Computer

#128

Post by mid-kid »

lostmsu wrote: post #84
mid-kid wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The snake oil is how the people at the top scream "in x years we won't need programmers" and end up proving themselves wrong time and time again. It's a real technology and it can do a lot, but it's being sold like snake oil while we're still figuring out what it's actually useful for and how to leverage it properly.

> "in x years we won't need programmers" and end up proving themselves wrong time and time again This is how it looks in your head, maybe. But in reality since Sonnet 3.5 - when the whole "no need programmers" started - no "years" have passed. Sonnet 3.5 came out on June 20, 2024. We are still 5 days away from the lowest possible "years". So even if you quoted them literally, they could not have possibly proved thems…

It was just an example of the type of shit they say to sell it, and then walk back from.

https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/sam-altman-dario-amodei-walki...

Re: I Love the Computer

#129

Post by patates »

1313ed01 wrote: post #127
patates wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, so Norwegian it is :)

Except the one on the right is in Swedish.

To me, all seems like a bunch of words I can recognize surrounded with stuff I mostly can't recognize but can sort of work out from the context.

Re: I Love the Computer

#130

Post by teekert »

I think we all sympathize and feel this way.

But it's also because we are getting older, and we are romanizing those sleepless nights getting 3D acceleration to work in Slackware with Dropline Gnome. Our first chat experiences, first emails, IRC, making your first website, getting your first server online...

It's easy to think that the weary giants of steel messed up our beloved internet, and they certainly took a large share of it (and indeed messed it up). But our internet is still there, faster and better than ever, and there are still social spaces naturally independent of the tyrannies they seek to impose on us. When I go to i.e. FOSDEM I feel that feeling from my youth, it's still very much there.

Ok, it is very annoying that they are messing with the prices of our hardware and I feel that. But that will pass. Perhaps in a year or so we get a wrinkle effect and stuff will be cheap for some time. And we can do "AI" our way (on our terms and hardware).

Let's not get so negative, just try to ignore the negative things and focus on the positive (like my gigabit symmetrical connection whoop whoop, yes it has cgNAT but I have WireGuard).

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