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A desktop made for one

isene.org

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Re: A desktop made for one

#181

Post by geir_isene »

viccis wrote: post #155
dimator wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read somewhere (in the myriad blog posts dealing with this Cambrian LLM explosion) that software developers could be put into two camps: those that just want the thing to exist, and those that want to build and understand the thing (in addition to wanting it to exist). those in the first camp are having a great time. those in the second camp (which is how you're describing yourself, and how I'd describe myself) are…

I'm in the second camp. Part of it's that the whole point of going into this industry is that I love coding and have been doing it since I was 8. Part of it is that I'm a control freak and it makes me uncomfortable to have to trust AI generated code. Sure, I already trust interpreters and compilers, but those are much more deterministic, and they don't generally do anything I have to be wary of. Part of it is that an…

I was in the second camp until last summer, having been hand-writing code since 1979.

Re: A desktop made for one

#183

Post by abrookewood »

This is pretty crazy. The largest of the applications is the shell: bare Interactive shell with line editing, history, completion, nicks, multi-pipes, redirects, here-strings, abbreviations, undo, smart hotkeys ~16k (lines) ~150KB (size). Far out.

Link: https://github.com/isene/chasm

Re: A desktop made for one

#184

Post by latexr »

dimator wrote: post #147
aorth wrote: post #138

Brilliant! I hate it. The author will surely admit that there was "joy" in creating this suite of software, but it's a different kind of joy than most of us here would recognize. I am looking forward to being a part of the group of detractors doing things the old way, similar to the "small web" or other counter cultures on the Internet. I fantasize about being here to pick up the pieces after all the others went full…

I read somewhere (in the myriad blog posts dealing with this Cambrian LLM explosion) that software developers could be put into two camps: those that just want the thing to exist, and those that want to build and understand the thing (in addition to wanting it to exist). those in the first camp are having a great time. those in the second camp (which is how you're describing yourself, and how I'd describe myself) are…

> I read somewhere (…) that software developers could be put into two camps (…)

Surely you read it more than once, because that has become a talking point. It’s a false dichotomy that, you’ll notice, is most often used by the people who put themselves in the first camp to steer the conversation. By framing it as “there are two camps, it’s just different, none of them is better”, it lends legitimacy to their position.

You don't have to pick one camp over the other. Good, high quality craft makes good products.

> after all, when did you see any members of the Enterprise writing code?

When did you see anyone in any media taking a dump, or sleeping, or doing any of the boring bits? Rarely, because if it’s not relevant to the story they don’t show it, but it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

I’m more of a DS9 fan, and I remember them having computer problems all the time. O’Brien, despite being highly competent and the chief of engineering with a team, was constantly overworked.

And their computers were infinitely superior to the LLMs we have now. When they gave you an answer, you could be confident it was correct. And if they didn’t know, they’d tell you!

Re: A desktop made for one

#185

Post by ahaferburg »

geir_isene wrote: post #58
cloudhead wrote: post #53

Did you have to look or review any of the code produced, to get the performance/capabilities that you wanted, or were all interactions through CC? In other words, did you hit any walls with the pure agentic workflow?

I monitored the process very tightly. I have programmed my fair share of asm (and some 30 other programming languages), but for this I did not read any code. I hit lots of obstacles on this road, lots. In the process we also created a complete TTF rasterizer on par with what kitty gives me, and that was a true deep-dive.

I think some of these obstacles are documented here. https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode

I found the asm skill file quite interesting. Gives a glimpse into a world I didn't know still existed. Very cool! https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode/blob/main/skills/x86_64-...

Thank you for sharing!

Re: A desktop made for one

#186

Post by ptnpzwqd »

dimator wrote: post #147
aorth wrote: post #138

Brilliant! I hate it. The author will surely admit that there was "joy" in creating this suite of software, but it's a different kind of joy than most of us here would recognize. I am looking forward to being a part of the group of detractors doing things the old way, similar to the "small web" or other counter cultures on the Internet. I fantasize about being here to pick up the pieces after all the others went full…

I read somewhere (in the myriad blog posts dealing with this Cambrian LLM explosion) that software developers could be put into two camps: those that just want the thing to exist, and those that want to build and understand the thing (in addition to wanting it to exist). those in the first camp are having a great time. those in the second camp (which is how you're describing yourself, and how I'd describe myself) are…

I think a notable difference is that the AI that is portrayed in most sci-fi (that I have read/watched anyway) tend to be "logical machines" that act deterministically based on the data available to them.

What we got are "statistical machines" that tend to do the right thing under the right conditions, but can go completely off the rail every now and then.

The former are more akin to a generalization of computers as we typically think of it, whereas the latter is something else. Maybe that something else is closer to human behavior in some ways, but also so very different - unlike humans, where you get to know people, build relationships, know who to trust in what ways, and so forth, you can never really trust an LLM with any critical tasks without close supervision.

Re: A desktop made for one

#187

Post by theshrike79 »

dimator wrote: post #166
theshrike79 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kinda like the woodworking analogy of this. I, in theory, can plane a piece of wood with a hand planer. But I'll never do it again, we did it at school in ye olden times before the millennium and it was boring then as it is boring now. I know people who get satisfaction from it, they take one sliver off with the hand planer, feel the wood with their hand and figure out the perfect angle for the next tiny sliver of…

Your analogy is not really apples to apples though, is it? More close is: if there was a table making machine, you just push a button and something like a table comes out, would you still be a woodworker? You haven't planed, nor measured, nor cut, nor jointed, you've only pressed on "make me a table"

And I wouldn't claim I was a woodworker. But I might be a "furniture designer", if I can adjust the parameters of what kind of table it plops out.

Re: A desktop made for one

#188

Post by theshrike79 »

yuye wrote: post #168
theshrike79 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kinda like the woodworking analogy of this. I, in theory, can plane a piece of wood with a hand planer. But I'll never do it again, we did it at school in ye olden times before the millennium and it was boring then as it is boring now. I know people who get satisfaction from it, they take one sliver off with the hand planer, feel the wood with their hand and figure out the perfect angle for the next tiny sliver of…

I don't think the analogy works. You're focusing on the "how", not the "what". Using a mechanical planer, you still need to dial in numbers yourself. You design your own table, the more modern tools just make it easier to realize your vision. Another example: I enjoy writing with a good pen. But whether I write by pen or on a keyboard, it's still me writing it. However, AI does basically all the real work, only leavi…

Yea, it's not a perfect analogy =) I've been trying to figure out the perfect one, but the one that hits most would need to be done as a comic strip format - and I can't draw for shit and refuse to use AI for it. Maybe one day.

It all depends on the view you take on the thing. What real problem are you solving? If the problem is "I need a table for X", both ways solve it. How the problem is solved is secondary.

I don't need pride in "making it myself", what I get pride in is "I solved this problem". Printing something out of Thingiverse still solves the problem, as does buying something ready-made. For me, personally, the means doesn't matter - I get zero dopamine in doing something the hard way, quite the opposite.

As for the writing, there are actual studies that writing by hand activates different parts of your brain than typing.

Re: A desktop made for one

#189

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

geir_isene wrote: post #11
robotresearcher wrote: post #4

I’m inspired by the message. On this software itself: I’d like to know how this feels to use. It’s so very lightweight. Does it feel categorically different to what we are used to? One of the things I miss about the 1980s home computers is that they booted into a usable command line in a handful of seconds, from a few KB in ROM. Imagine what today’s HW could do if we’d retained that level of efficiency.

It feels very different. It's all damn instant. Me happy.

How often do you hit against bugs that stop you from being able to do something and then you have to stop what you're doing and go fix the bug?

For me, I've used i3-wm exclusively for 4 years now, and it has always felt instant. I struggle to believe that getting whatever incremental performance at the cost of increased bugs is worth bothering about it.

Re: A desktop made for one

#190

Post by overfeed »

This appears to be a harbinger of a Plastic-era of software. A miracle product that's used for everything, and will turn up everywhere before we've had the chance to consider the wider impact. Learning to write software in a generation will be a royal mess, as will be finding clean training data, and software discovery.
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