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Leave Me Behind

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Re: Leave Me Behind

#281

Post by dakiol »

dmix wrote: post #237
dakiol wrote: post #179

The problem with (propietary AI) is that they (anthropic/google/openai/etc) gain more from the usage of AI than you. Other tools like postgres, gcc, git, HTTP, emacs, etc. don't "gain" anything if you use them (well, they gain popularity and perhaps more contributions, but that's it). The more you use Claude, the richer anthropic gets and the easier for them to position themselves in a place of power, power to domina…

There were lots of proprietary database companies in the 70s-90s when they first came out (Oracle, IBM, Sybase, SQL Server), but these days open source databases are the default. Everyone's making so many wild predictions based off the current state of LLMs. We don't know how the market will unfold. Even in regards to programming competency and the culture of vibecoding, it's similar to the early stages of electric c…

> Everyone's making so many wild predictions based off the current state of LLMs. We don't know how the market will unfold.

So wouldn't it be wiser to err on the side of caution?

Re: Leave Me Behind

#282

Post by m463 »

> working on the very dating app I would use to meet my wife.

see! only the developers get the good matches.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#283

Post by josephg »

cryo32 wrote: post #46
josephg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I'm more motivated than ever to make stuff at the moment. I have a long list of projects I've always wanted to make, but I never had time. The barrier is so low now. For example, I want to make: - A mini OS on top of SeL4 - A UI framework based on SolidJS, for native apps, in rust. - My own photo manager (which can do backups & sync across all my devices). And a gallery to share photos with friends - A local…

Leisure projects for me at least are about the personal challenge and achievement. If the LLM does it, you achieved nothing.

> If the LLM does it, you achieved nothing.

Oh get off your high horse.

You may as well say "If the compiler compiles your code, you achieved nothing". Its the same argument.

I love meaty algorithmic challenges. And I enjoy the design challenge of making a piece of software. But I don't write CSS for fun. Debugging styling issues on mobile? I hate it.

LLMs let me work on the parts that I find enjoyable and satisfying. Like UI design, or figuring out the data model. And then I can delegate the parts I don't like to Claude. It seems very happy to bang away at CSS.

That's a great deal. If you want to personally write every line of code, good for you. But don't police my leisure projects.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#284

Post by josephg »

uncognic wrote: post #76
josephg wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything I want to make is new. I don't understand the objection. For example, the photo backup system I want to make will let me manage my ~400gb photo library. I want my library backed up on a couple devices, running linux and freebsd. I want my mac and iphone to have a local mirror of all the favorited photos, and when I'm at home, I want to be able to browse all photos from those devices by streaming them over…

Take a look at https://immich.app/

Oh that looks lovely. I enjoy the UI and all the work on tagging and classification. But its still missing some features I want:

- I want native desktop apps

- I want P2P device sync. My laptop and my home server should be peers. Just with different rules for which photos are stored locally on each device.

- I want per-device storage rules. (Eg, "I want all my favorited photos, and recent photos up to 50gb on my laptop").

- Backups. I want to be able to plug in an external hard drive and backup my photos (with some rules). Then disconnect the drive and see in the metadata for those photos that I have a copy of the full res RAW on that drive.

But even if other programs exist, its still fun to make something myself. Authoring your own software gives you a different relationship with the computer. You're less of a consumer. You can change or tweak features on a whim. Psychologically, its kind of like being in your own home vs being in a hotel room. If you hate the furniture at home, you can move it or change it. You can decorate however you like. In a hotel, you're affected by your environment but you have no agency over it. I think its much more healthy to create.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#286

Post by castedo »

aspenmartin wrote: post #275
castedo wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that these "stochastic code extruders" can solve Erdos problems is sort of the proof in the pudding. This claim is very misleading and not really true. It reflects the kind of exaggeration and spin made by corporate marketing. I would not call this a fact at all. Like many claims made by for-profit marketing, if one looks into the details and think critically about what is being claimed, one can see that c…

> exaggeration and spin made by corporate marketing. corporate marketing spins and hypes, but this is an ultimately pretty academic and mathematical field. The loud LinkedIn promoters are not building these systems. "if one looks into the details and think critically about what is being claimed, one can see that consumers are jumping to false conclusions." well then help us out here: can you be specific? To me it sou…

> well then help us out here: can you be specific?

In "Remarks on the disproof of the unit distance conjecture" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20695) I think Melanie Matchett Wood's remark is the most informative: "It is easy to jump to hasty conclusions, but what we can learn about humans, AI, and mathematics from this development is somewhat subtle. I believe if the level and type of human expertise that is represented on this note had been assembled to find a counterexample to this conjecture a month ago, and those people put in similar amounts of time working on it than they did to reading and thinking about ChatGPT’s solution, the mathematicians would have found a counterexample. However, without the claimed proof by ChatGPT, there is no particular reason anyone would have tried to look for a counterexample, assembled a group of experts with the appropriate expertise, or that the experts would have agreed to turn their attention to this problem."

Some readers might find some of the other remarks more appealing or more informative. I encourage folks to read these remarks rather than the OpenAI marketing video and spin.

> To me it sounds a lot like goalpost moving. You're telling me that in 2020 if I showed you a system that can solve an Erdos problem or disprove a conjecture (just recently showed up) you wouldn't be blown away?

I'm not sure what goalpost you are talking about. Regarding 2020: it depends on the framing, how much I know about the conjecture, the details of the computer system. I an easily imagine not being blown away. But I don't really see the relevance of our emotional reactions to computers doing new things we've never seen computers do before. If the goalpost is being "blown away" by what computers can do, then that happened I think around 1990 when I heard a computer program generate a vaguely human sounding voice. In math, I think it happened when I saw Mathematica simplified a huge nasty complicated algebra expression around 2000. I've been "blown away" by new things computers can do many times over the past 36 years.

> Woah woah, that's not the conclusion I'm jumping to. ... ok but now we're solving real math problems.

Sounds like we are in agreement then that (1) LLMs can not solve any given Erdos problem and (2) computers are solving more real math problems than they were before.

I honestly do think what the OpenAI group did with an LLM recently is a new milestone worthy of attention if one is interested in computer assisted mathematics. I don't mean to diminish the LLM feat. I just mean to throw shade on the corporate marketing, language, slick video, and spin.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#287

Post by josephg »

righthand wrote: post #64
josephg wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything I want to make is new. I don't understand the objection. For example, the photo backup system I want to make will let me manage my ~400gb photo library. I want my library backed up on a couple devices, running linux and freebsd. I want my mac and iphone to have a local mirror of all the favorited photos, and when I'm at home, I want to be able to browse all photos from those devices by streaming them over…

Ente photos is one thing and there are others. You can accomplish most of that by installing Syncthing. But the objection is that you’re not really building anything new even if you think it’s a new idea. By your definition you’re building for yourself and not sharing…so what good are your little projects. Reading your original list it just seems like you want to build and run software without having to do any resear…

> But the objection is that you’re not really building anything new even if you think it’s a new idea. By your definition you’re building for yourself and not sharing…so what good are your little projects.

What an incredibly blinkered view. You think there's no value at all in making software unless your program solves a truly novel problem, and does so for millions of users?

There's so much joy that can be found in simple, disposable acts of creativity. I don't need the world to applaud when I cook an omelette, make a table out of wood or play a piece on the piano. Why would I need that from the software I make? Just because you can buy a table from IKEA doesn't mean its not fun to make one yourself. Just because someone on spotify played it better doesn't mean there's no joy in playing music.

Why would I hesitate to make my ideal photo library program, just because other programs exist? What a sad, self-limiting rule.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#288

Post by josephg »

argee wrote: post #279
righthand wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ente photos is one thing and there are others. You can accomplish most of that by installing Syncthing. But the objection is that you’re not really building anything new even if you think it’s a new idea. By your definition you’re building for yourself and not sharing…so what good are your little projects. Reading your original list it just seems like you want to build and run software without having to do any resear…

I have everything this guy is talking about just from running Filerun (with the Nextcloud client for mirrors) and backing up to Backblaze R2. At some point developers seem to forget that other developers exist.

> At some point developers seem to forget that other developers exist.

At some point developers seem to forget that making stuff is fun. The fact SQLite and GCC exist doesn't mean you're banned from making a database or a C compiler.

You're allowed to make stuff just because.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#289

Post by blks »

unknownfuture wrote: post #205
ary wrote: post #167

There are a number of comments here where people open up about their contrasting experiences of not being a part of a programming community. Those are well addressed, I think, but there is another point to consider. We need to remember the people, that we may never talk to, that are downstream of all of this software. Not necessarily “the users” as there are many pieces of software meant for other devs, but I think t…

> Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world. I genuinely don't know if that's true and I doubt you do, either. It's all feels right now. What I do know is I run a couple of personal projects and I can say they are of objectively higher quality now that I'm using AI to build out proper CI pipelines, expand test coverage, prod…

People now just tell on themselves when they say that their projects’ quality is significantly better now with LLMs
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