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Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

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Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#171

Post by spauldo »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #140
brentjanderson wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's actually a term for this, Context Collapse [1] that explores how social media forces everyone to have a single online persona instead of presenting in the way that makes sense for a given social context (e.g. the "you" at work vs. the "you" at school vs. the "you" with family). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse

This meshes deeply with "The medium is the message" from McLuhan.

Wonderware has an automatic I/O assignment feature that - if you follow some basic rules on naming things - sets up all your data sources for you automatically. It cuts out maybe a quarter of your development time.

I don't use it because I mostly automate fuel farms, and I do that by taking a blank fuel farm config we created and customize it for a particular site. We have scripting in place to assign data sources that work with a standardized set of PLC data structures that we've written. Most Wonderware installs are one-offs that start with a blank slate, so our use case is unusual.

That doesn't make auto-assignment a bad feature. It just means it's not the best fit for me. Likewise, Google Circles was a good feature that I never used because I only ever knew one other person who used Google Plus.

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#172

Post by mikewarot »

intended wrote: post #167
mikewarot wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LLMs come in as an enabler to get over "white page" paralysis, and/or overwhelming amounts of libraries to learn to use. Earlier today, I was chatting with the folks in my computer club, discussing how I wrote a little program just to explore the nature of small neural networks. Then I decided to show them how I use Visual Studio Code with ChatGPT5 (from my GitHub subscription) The next thing you know, I had a ba…

Thank you for putting in clear info about the language, task and results! I’m going to add that you have likely been programming forever. I am beginning to suspect that the ability to get value out of GenAI is almost entirely dependent on the ability to recognize bad patterns at a glance. In essence, it’s a tool for power users, not for neophytes. Good lord, its going to be the excel problem on steroids.

Excel is the worlds most popular declarative programming language.

2 things I'd fix about it, remove default assuming certain things are dates, and adding a way to mark an area of a spreadsheet as a database table, so you can't sort only some of the columns.

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#173

Post by sandbach »

mikewarot wrote: post #172
intended wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for putting in clear info about the language, task and results! I’m going to add that you have likely been programming forever. I am beginning to suspect that the ability to get value out of GenAI is almost entirely dependent on the ability to recognize bad patterns at a glance. In essence, it’s a tool for power users, not for neophytes. Good lord, its going to be the excel problem on steroids.

Excel is the worlds most popular declarative programming language. 2 things I'd fix about it, remove default assuming certain things are dates, and adding a way to mark an area of a spreadsheet as a database table, so you can't sort only some of the columns.

Excel has tables (Insert > Table), which take care of your second point.

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#174

Post by skylurk »

mikewarot wrote: post #163
uludag wrote: post #161

I 100% agree with everything in this article, though I'm confused what AI has to do with any of this. People have been doing this sort of thing long before LLMs arrived. Weekend projects doing cool things where definitely a thing long before LLMs. I'd say that cloud services (e.g. Twilio) were the real enablers to these sorts of projects so it seems wrong to be crediting LLMs with this type of work. Cloud services ge…

The LLMs come in as an enabler to get over "white page" paralysis, and/or overwhelming amounts of libraries to learn to use. Earlier today, I was chatting with the folks in my computer club, discussing how I wrote a little program just to explore the nature of small neural networks. Then I decided to show them how I use Visual Studio Code with ChatGPT5 (from my GitHub subscription) The next thing you know, I had a ba…

To be fair, some of that is the python:

https://xkcd.com/353/

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#175

Post by uludag »

mikewarot wrote: post #163
uludag wrote: post #161

I 100% agree with everything in this article, though I'm confused what AI has to do with any of this. People have been doing this sort of thing long before LLMs arrived. Weekend projects doing cool things where definitely a thing long before LLMs. I'd say that cloud services (e.g. Twilio) were the real enablers to these sorts of projects so it seems wrong to be crediting LLMs with this type of work. Cloud services ge…

The LLMs come in as an enabler to get over "white page" paralysis, and/or overwhelming amounts of libraries to learn to use. Earlier today, I was chatting with the folks in my computer club, discussing how I wrote a little program just to explore the nature of small neural networks. Then I decided to show them how I use Visual Studio Code with ChatGPT5 (from my GitHub subscription) The next thing you know, I had a ba…

I totally get the point your trying to make. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think it's unfair/misleading that anything with a veneer of LLMs has all the credit driven to the LLM and not to the thing that provides the bulk of the value.

Like for example, clearly you are a very experienced developer with a vast amount of experience. To say that the extent and reach to which you are able to apply technologies is because LLMs seems wrong; it's your rich technical background which allow you to use LLMs in an effective manner.

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#176

Post by jatora »

uludag wrote: post #161

I 100% agree with everything in this article, though I'm confused what AI has to do with any of this. People have been doing this sort of thing long before LLMs arrived. Weekend projects doing cool things where definitely a thing long before LLMs. I'd say that cloud services (e.g. Twilio) were the real enablers to these sorts of projects so it seems wrong to be crediting LLMs with this type of work. Cloud services ge…

The amount that can be prototyped is astronomically higher with LLM's, which lowers the barrier to do these things and troubleshoot libraries/architectures. Naturally the amount of hobby projects has exploded multiple OOM's beyond what was done before, regardless of any gatekeeping you wish you could do :P

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#177

Post by gus_tpm »

jatora wrote: post #176
uludag wrote: post #161

I 100% agree with everything in this article, though I'm confused what AI has to do with any of this. People have been doing this sort of thing long before LLMs arrived. Weekend projects doing cool things where definitely a thing long before LLMs. I'd say that cloud services (e.g. Twilio) were the real enablers to these sorts of projects so it seems wrong to be crediting LLMs with this type of work. Cloud services ge…

The amount that can be prototyped is astronomically higher with LLM's, which lowers the barrier to do these things and troubleshoot libraries/architectures. Naturally the amount of hobby projects has exploded multiple OOM's beyond what was done before, regardless of any gatekeeping you wish you could do :P

I don't think they were trying to gatekeep. They were just saying that it shouldn't not be concluded to be because of llms

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#178

Post by KronisLV »

brabel wrote: post #38
nine_k wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you use something like Cursor with your local models? Is the quality comparable? Is the speed acceptable?

For quality to be comparable, you need to use a relatively big model, which will only work if you have around 64GB of RAM or more. The latest OpenAI local models ( https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/ ), for example, are really good, but you probably want the 120b to have results at least near what you get with their best cloud models, and that requires I think 80GB+. If you don't have that much, you can try…

I had pretty mixed experiences with the 20B version of GPT-OSS, sometimes that thing would just start looping in the thinking block and no sampler parameters would seem to do anything for specific questions.

That said Qwen3 and Qwen3 Coder are both pretty nice. Also ERNIE 4.5 if the benchmarks are to be trusted but I mostly run Ollama instead of vLLM now so can’t test it out atm (apparently llama.cpp added support for them recently though).

The models by Mistral might also be worth a look and personally I thought the EuroLLM project was also nice, but MoE models feel way more palatable on limited hardware.

Neither seem to be able to directly compete with Sonnet 4 or Gemini 2.5 Pro, would need way better hardware to come close.

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#179

Post by quitit »

In a way this is how AI can help us return to doing things for interest, pleasure or creativity.

Now my hobbies and experiments don't need to make money, some might, but I don't have any pressure to only allocate time to things that I know I can turn into an income stream, or worse steer it's natural development to the $.

I liken it to early painters and composers. What originally started as their passion and creative expression had led these artists onto the path of "poor starving artist". The realisation comes quickly that doing something to your maximum effort means that it also needs to be the breadwinner. The hope for AI is that it is able to rapidly fulfil the breadwinning side of things, leaving time for the artist to extend beyond their previous limitation.

I certainly see this already with how I use AI. I leave it to do the arduous work while I work on the bigger idea.

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