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What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

dynamicland.org

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Re: What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

#51

Im genuinely blown away by llms. I’m an artist who’ve always struggled to learn how to code. I can pick up on computer science concepts, but when I try to sit down and write actual code my brain just pretends it doesn’t exist. Over like 20 years, despite numerous attempts I could never get past few beginner exercises. I viscerally can’t stand the headspace that coding puts me in. Last night I managed to build a custo…

I enjoy the fun attitude, I had a family member state something similar, but I always warn: with powerful AI comes serious consequences. Are we ready for those consequences? How far do we want AI to reach into our lives and livelihood?

We cannot predict what the consequences will be, but, as a species, we are pretty good at navigating upheavals, opportunities. There are no guarantees that human ingenuity is likely to always save the day, but the fact evolution has bestowed us with risk taking, curiosity, so we won’t stop.

Enjoy the ride.

Re: What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

#52
post #47
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a gorgeous site with custom code injected CSS and Java (while grokking most of it) From the context, it's not Java, but Javascript.

This was the most surprising/disturbing/enlightening part of the post imo. Surpring; this person literally had no clue! Disturbing; this person literally had no clue? Enlightening; this person literally did not need a clue. My takeaway as an AI skeptic is AI as human augmentation may really have potential?

Just a vision and goal.

I feel like, AI makes learning way more accessible, at least it did for me, where it evoked a childlike sense of curiosity and joy for learning new things.

I’m also working on a Trading Card Game, where I feed it my drawings and it renders it into final polished form based on visual style that I spent some time building in chat GPT. It’s like an amplifier / accelerator.

I feel like, yes while it can augment us, at the end day it depends on our desire to grow and learn. Otherwise, you will end up with same result as everybody else.

Re: What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

#53

> we aim for a computing system that is fully visible and understandable top-to-bottom I mean even for something that is in theory fully understandable like the linux kernel it is not feasible to actually read the source before using it. To me this really makes no sense. Even for traditional programming we only have so powerful systems because we use a layered approach. You can look into these layers and understand t…

That’s because you’re conflating “understanding” with “comprehension”. You can understand every component in a chain and its function, how it works, where its fragilities lay or capabilities are absent, without reviewing the source code for everything you install. To comprehend , however, you must be intimately familiar with the underlying source code, how it compiles, how it speaks to the hardware, etc. I believe th…

I would go one step further: if you look at what Bret Victor has been researching for the past 20ish years it has been all about explaining difficult systems in a simple way. I'm pretty sure he genuinely wants every part to be explained, from the bottom up. You'll also get that sense if you read his library short fiction[1].

Now, whether that's possible is up for debate, but we could definitely use a push in that direction, a system that we can genuinely understand top to bottom, so that we can modify it to what we need. That's where agency comes into his argument.

[1] https://dynamicland.org/2019/The_Library.pdf

Re: What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoy the fun attitude, I had a family member state something similar, but I always warn: with powerful AI comes serious consequences. Are we ready for those consequences? How far do we want AI to reach into our lives and livelihood?

We cannot predict what the consequences will be, but, as a species, we are pretty good at navigating upheavals, opportunities. There are no guarantees that human ingenuity is likely to always save the day, but the fact evolution has bestowed us with risk taking, curiosity, so we won’t stop. Enjoy the ride.

No, we are not good at that. We have dire warnings of extreme catastrophes heading our way for decades now and instead of fixing what is broken, we collectively decide to race to our extinction faster.

Re: What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

#55
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, CDNs require a lot of infrastructure to be effective, what did you (or the LLM) use to set that up?

Maybe CDN isn’t the right term after all, see I’m not a software engineer! But, basically I wanted a way to have a custom repository of fonts a la Google Fonts (found their selection kinda boring) that I could pull from. Ran fonts through transfonter to convert them to .woff2, set up a GitHub repository (which is not designed for people like me), and set up an instance on Netlify, then wrote custom CSS tags for my gh…

Sounds more like a Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline - defined as a set of practices that automate the process of building, testing and deploying software. Or rather, fonts in this case.

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of geographically scattered servers that speeds up delivery of web content by being closer to users. Most video/image services use CDNs to efficiently serve up content to users around the world. For example, someone watching Netflix in California will connect to a different server than someone watching the same show in London.

Re: What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

#57
post #45

Im genuinely blown away by llms. I’m an artist who’ve always struggled to learn how to code. I can pick up on computer science concepts, but when I try to sit down and write actual code my brain just pretends it doesn’t exist. Over like 20 years, despite numerous attempts I could never get past few beginner exercises. I viscerally can’t stand the headspace that coding puts me in. Last night I managed to build a custo…

I do love the approachability they create. Personally as a coder, I don't find the AI experience at all fun, but I get that others do. Have you tried using AI to further changes to any of these projects down the line?

Makes sense. I know what I built is nowhere near actual software development. Still I was able to quickly learn how things work through GPT.

Since I’ve literally been working on this project for two days, here’s a somewhat related answer to your question: I’ve been using chat gpt to build art for TCG. Initially I was resistant and upset at AI companies were hoovering up people’s work wholesale for training data (which is why I think now is an excellent time to have serious conversation about UBI, but I digress).

But I finally realized that I could develop my own distinctive 3D visual style by feeding GPT my drawings and having it iterate in interesting directions. It’s fun to refine the style, by having GPT simulate actual camera lens and lighting set up.

But yes I’ve used AI to make numerous stylistic tweaks to my site, including building out a tagging system that allows me to customize the look of individual pages when I write a post)

Hope I’ll be able to learn how to build an actual complex app one day, or games.

Re: What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe CDN isn’t the right term after all, see I’m not a software engineer! But, basically I wanted a way to have a custom repository of fonts a la Google Fonts (found their selection kinda boring) that I could pull from. Ran fonts through transfonter to convert them to .woff2, set up a GitHub repository (which is not designed for people like me), and set up an instance on Netlify, then wrote custom CSS tags for my gh…

Sounds more like a Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline - defined as a set of practices that automate the process of building, testing and deploying software. Or rather, fonts in this case. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of geographically scattered servers that speeds up delivery of web content by being closer to users. Most video/image services use CDNs to efficiently ser…

Gotcha. Appreciate you taking the time to teach me!

Re: What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

#59

Im genuinely blown away by llms. I’m an artist who’ve always struggled to learn how to code. I can pick up on computer science concepts, but when I try to sit down and write actual code my brain just pretends it doesn’t exist. Over like 20 years, despite numerous attempts I could never get past few beginner exercises. I viscerally can’t stand the headspace that coding puts me in. Last night I managed to build a custo…

I think much of HN has a blind spot that prevents them from engaging with the facts. Yes, AI currently has limitations and isn't a panacea for cognitive tasks. But in many specific use cases it is enormously useful, and the rapid growth of ChatGPT, AI startups, etc. is evidence of that. Many will argue that it's all fake, that it's all artificial hype to prop of VC evaluations, etc. They literally will see the billio…

because the preachers preach how amazing it is on their greenfield 'i built a todo list app in 5 minutes from scratch' and then you use it on an established codebase with a bigger context than the llm could ever possibly consume and spend 5x more time debugging the slop than it would've taken you to do the task yourself, and you become jaded

stop underestimating the amount of internalized knowledge people can have about projects in the real world, it's so annoying.

an llm can't ever possibly get close to it. there's some guy in a team in another building who knows why a certain weird piece of critical business logic was put there 6 years ago, the llm will never know this and won't understand this even if it consumed the whole repository because it would have to work there for years to understand how the business works

Re: What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

#60

Im genuinely blown away by llms. I’m an artist who’ve always struggled to learn how to code. I can pick up on computer science concepts, but when I try to sit down and write actual code my brain just pretends it doesn’t exist. Over like 20 years, despite numerous attempts I could never get past few beginner exercises. I viscerally can’t stand the headspace that coding puts me in. Last night I managed to build a custo…

I enjoy the fun attitude, I had a family member state something similar, but I always warn: with powerful AI comes serious consequences. Are we ready for those consequences? How far do we want AI to reach into our lives and livelihood?

We managed to survive the nuke and environmental lead (two examples of humanity veering into drastically wrong directions)

we are never ready for seismic changes. But we will have to adapt one way or another, might as well find a good use for it and develop awareness as a child would around handling knives.

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