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Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

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Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#41

Post by ryandrake »

jmull wrote: post #10

> Anyone who can't find use cases for LLMs isn't trying hard enough That's an interesting viewpoint from an AI marketing company. I think the essential job of marketing is to help people make the connection between their problems and your solutions. Putting all on them in a kind of blamey way doesn't seem like a great approach to me.

It's a totally backwards way to build a product.

You're supposed to start with a use case that is unmet, and research/build technology to enable and solve the use case.

AI companies are instead starting with a specific technology, and then desperately searching for use cases that might somehow motivate people to use that technology. Now these guys are further arguing that it should be the user's problem to find use cases for the technology they seem utterly convinced needs to be developed.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#42

Post by gchamonlive »

tsimionescu wrote: post #32
gchamonlive wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you disagree it's important to have access to the data, ease of assessment notwithstanding?

I view it as more or less irrelevant. LLMs are fundamentally black boxes. Whether you run the black box locally or use it remotely, whether you train it yourself or use a pretrained version, whether you have access to the training set or not, it's completely irrelevant to control. Using an LLM means giving up control and understanding of the process. Whether it's OpenAI or the training data-guided algorithm that cont…

I on the other hand think it's irrelevant if a technology is a blackbox or not. If it's supposed to fit the opensource/FOSS model of the original post having access to precursors is just as important as having access to the weights.

It's fine for models to have open-weights and closed data. It's only barely fitting the opensource model IMHO though.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#43

Post by noahbrier »

Gerardo1 wrote: post #28
noahbrier wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that’s not what it means. You can read what I’ve written about this for the last three years and I’ve been very consistent. In the enterprise too many people are waiting to be told things and whether it’s good for my business or not I’d rather be honest about how I feel (you need to just use this stuff).

>No, that’s not what it means. That's fair but it's what I believe. ...see? Being consistent with stating your beliefs isn't the same as engaging with and about those beliefs. Advertising isn't conversation. Evangelism isn't discussion.

I'm trying to engage with you on this, but I'm really not sure what you're getting at. You originally stated "I think the essential job of marketing is to help people make the connection between their problems and your solutions. Putting all on them in a kind of blamey way doesn't seem like a great approach to me."

I agree that's the job of marketing, but I'm not someone who markets AI, I'm someone who helps large marketing organizations use it effectively. I agree that if my goal was to market it that wouldn't be an effective message, but my goal is for folks who work in these companies to take some accountability for their own personal development, so that's my message. Again, all I can do is be honest about how I feel and to be consistent in my beliefs and experiences working with these kinds of organizations.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#44

Post by dsr_ »

clickety_clack wrote: post #36
jmull wrote: post #10

> Anyone who can't find use cases for LLMs isn't trying hard enough That's an interesting viewpoint from an AI marketing company. I think the essential job of marketing is to help people make the connection between their problems and your solutions. Putting all on them in a kind of blamey way doesn't seem like a great approach to me.

I disagree actually. Saying things like “everyone else managed to figure it out” is a way of creating FOMO. It might not be the way you want to do it, marketing doesn’t have to be nice (or even right) to work.

I don't want to work with people who think that's good marketing, or people who are convinced by it.

FOMO is for fashions and fads, not getting things done.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#45

Post by clickety_clack »

dsr_ wrote: post #44
clickety_clack wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree actually. Saying things like “everyone else managed to figure it out” is a way of creating FOMO. It might not be the way you want to do it, marketing doesn’t have to be nice (or even right) to work.

I don't want to work with people who think that's good marketing, or people who are convinced by it. FOMO is for fashions and fads, not getting things done.

I’m responding to a comment that talks about whether that quote is good marketing so I’m just talking specifically about whether it might work from a marketing point of view.

I probably wouldn’t do it myself either, but that’s not really relevant to whether it works or not.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#46

Post by Frenchgeek »

jmull wrote: post #10

> Anyone who can't find use cases for LLMs isn't trying hard enough That's an interesting viewpoint from an AI marketing company. I think the essential job of marketing is to help people make the connection between their problems and your solutions. Putting all on them in a kind of blamey way doesn't seem like a great approach to me.

Is "finding a way to remove them, with prejudice, from my phone" a valid use case for them? I'm tired of Gemini randomly starting up.

(Well, I recently found there is a reason for it: I'm left handed and unlocking my phone with my left hand sometimes touch the icon stupidly put by default on the lock screen. Not that it would work: My phone is usually running with data disabled.)

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#47

Post by mrguyorama »

clickety_clack wrote: post #36
jmull wrote: post #10

> Anyone who can't find use cases for LLMs isn't trying hard enough That's an interesting viewpoint from an AI marketing company. I think the essential job of marketing is to help people make the connection between their problems and your solutions. Putting all on them in a kind of blamey way doesn't seem like a great approach to me.

I disagree actually. Saying things like “everyone else managed to figure it out” is a way of creating FOMO. It might not be the way you want to do it, marketing doesn’t have to be nice (or even right) to work.

"Good marketing" doesn't have to mean "Marketing that is maximally effective"

Filling food with opioids would be great for business, but hopefully you understand how that is not "good business"

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#48

Post by ploxiln »

noahbrier wrote: post #13
jmull wrote: post #10

> Anyone who can't find use cases for LLMs isn't trying hard enough That's an interesting viewpoint from an AI marketing company. I think the essential job of marketing is to help people make the connection between their problems and your solutions. Putting all on them in a kind of blamey way doesn't seem like a great approach to me.

That's fair. But it's what I believe. I spend a lot of time inside giant companies and there are too many people waiting for stone tablets to come down the mountain with their use cases instead of just playing with this stuff.

I've seen a bunch of big companies have edicts sent down from the top, "all employees should be using LLMs, if you're not then you're not doing your job". But many employees just don't have much that it applies to. Like, I spend a huge amount of time reviewing PRs. (Somebody, who actually knows stuff, has to do it.) Some of the more data-sci guys have added LLM review bots to some repos, but they're rather dumb and useless.

(And then the CISO sends some security tips email/slack announcement which is still dumb and useless even after an LLM added a bunch of emojis and fun language to it.)

I've always been an old-fashioned and slow developer. But it still seems to me, if most "regular" "average" developers churn out code that is more of a liability than an asset, if they can do that 10x faster, it doesn't really change the world. Most stuff still ends up waiting, in the end, for some slow work done right, or else gets thrown away soon enough.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#49

Post by mmphosis »

noahbrier wrote: post #26
skydhash wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the title, I read the article and there’s nothing in the article that supports the claim made in the title. Also about a tool being overly conplex. Something like find, imagemagick, ffmpeg,… are not complex in themselves. They’re solving a domain that itself is complex. But the tools are quite good the evidence is their stability where they’ve barely changed across decades.

This is my point. Those tools are great specifically because of the simplicity of how they expose their functionality.

and yet the tools are still difficult to use. I could Read The Fine Manual, web search, stackoverflow, post a question on a Bulletin Board, or ask the Generative Artificial Inference robot. A lot of this seems like our user interface preferences. For example, my preference is that I just intuitively know that -i followed by a filepath is the input file but why can't I just drag the video icon onto ffmpeg? What might be obvious to me is not necessarily exposed functionality that someone else can see right away.
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