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

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

#61

Post by nomel »

comeondude wrote: post #39

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'm an artist"

This is actually what I'm most excited about: in the reasonably near future, productivity will be related to who is most creative and who has the most interesting problems rather than who's spent the most hours behind a specific toolchain/compiler/language. Solutions to practical problems won't be required to go through a layer of software engineer. It's going to be amazing, and I'm going to be without a job.

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

#62

Post by alfalfasprout »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #50
comeondude wrote: post #39

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…

I'm not sure if this post is ragebait or not but I'll bite...

If anything, HN is in general very much on the LLM hype train. The contrarian takes tend to be from more experienced folks working on difficult problems that very much see the fundamental flaws in how we're talking about AI.

> 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 billions in revenue as not real

That's not what people are saying. They're noting that revenue is meaningless in the absence of looking at cost. And it's true, investor money is propping up extremely costly ventures in AI. These services operate at a substantial loss. The only way they can hope to survive is through promising future pricing power by promising they can one day (the proverbial next week) replace human labor.

> same with all the real people upskilled via LLM's in ways that are entirely unique to the utility of AI.

Again, no one really denies that LLMs can be useful in learning.

This all feels like a strawman-- it's important to approach these topics with nuance.

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

#63

Post by msgodel »

edaemon wrote: post #42
comeondude wrote: post #39

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…

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

CDNs are usually one of the more expensive things you can build, there's a reason most are run by large public companies.

Those are probably near the top of the list of things you don't want to blindly trust an LLM with building.

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

#64

Post by gmueckl »

why_at wrote: post #27
stego-tech wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 get that LLMs are a black box in ways that most other technologies aren't. It still feels to me like they have to be okay with abstracting out some of the details of how things work. Unless they have a lot of knowledge in electrical engineering/optics, the average user of this isn't going to understand how the camera or projector work except at a very high level. I feel like the problem with LLMs here is more that…

Building projection optics is a bench top experiment that we did in 7th grade in school. Electric circuitry isn't exactly rocket science, either. Things like LCD panels for projecting arbitrary images and CCD chips for cameras become harder to understand.

But the point is to make users understand the system enough to instill the confidence to change things and explore further. This is important because the true power of computer systems comes from their flexibility and malleability.

You can never build that level of confidence with LLMs.

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

#65

Post by deadbabe »

nomel wrote: post #61
comeondude wrote: post #39

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'm an artist" This is actually what I'm most excited about: in the reasonably near future, productivity will be related to who is most creative and who has the most interesting problems rather than who's spent the most hours behind a specific toolchain/compiler/language. Solutions to practical problems won't be required to go through a layer of software engineer. It's going to be amazing, and I'm going to be with…

Why would you be out of a job? Nothing he described is something that someone is being paid to do. Look at everything he needs just to match a fraction of your power.

Consumer apps may see less sales as people opt to just clone an app using AI for their own personal use, customized for their preferences.

But there’s a lot of engineering being done out there that people don’t even know exists, and that has to be done by people who know exactly what they’re doing, not just weekend warriors shouting stuff at an LLM.

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

#66

Post by smj-edison »

thatguymike wrote: post #5

I'm sympathetic, but I do think Realtalk could be improved with some simple object recognition and LLMing. One of the challenges I found when I played with RealTalk is interoperability. The aim is to use the "spacial layer" to bootstrap people's intuitions on how programs should work, and interact with the world. It's really cool when this works. But key intuitions about how things interact when combined with each ot…

The way you'd figure this out in dynamic land is you'd look at the balloon, which by custom would have the code taped on somewhere. You'd read that code, figure out what it's looking for, and write said trigger.

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

#67

Post by [deleted] »

why_at wrote: post #16

I'm only just now reading about Dynamicland for the first time, so maybe I'm not understanding something obvious. The text description is not very helpful, as far as I can tell from pictures it's a place where you can move around physical objects and papers to do computer programming type stuff? Under visibility they say: >To empower people to understand and have full agency over the systems they are involved in, we…

[deleted]

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

#68

Post by _rpf »

rtkwe wrote: post #19
why_at wrote: post #16

I'm only just now reading about Dynamicland for the first time, so maybe I'm not understanding something obvious. The text description is not very helpful, as far as I can tell from pictures it's a place where you can move around physical objects and papers to do computer programming type stuff? Under visibility they say: >To empower people to understand and have full agency over the systems they are involved in, we…

Dynamicland is bootstrapped in a sense, [0] the same way you write the first compiler/interpreter for your code in another language then later write it in it's own language. The code running the camera and projector systems is also running from physically printed programs in one of the videos you can see a wall that's the core 'OS' so to speak of Dynamicland. I think the vision is neat but hampered by the projector t…

If you’re looking for an open source project like Realtalk there is https://folk.computer/

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

#69

Post by jofla_net »

thousand_nights wrote: post #59
atleastoptimal wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ab…

totally. Especially when i'm debugging something for colleagues or friends, given a domain and a handful of ways of doing it, if i'm familiar with it I generally already get a sense of the reasons why its failing or falling short. This has nothing to do with the code base, any given language not withstanding. It comes from years and decades of systems and idiosyncratic behaviors of systems and examples which strangely rear their heads in notable ways.

Theese notable ways may also not be commonly known or put into words, but they persist nevertheless.

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

#70

Post by dmix »

thousand_nights wrote: post #59
atleastoptimal wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ab…

A completely non-technical saleslady on our team prototyped a whole JS web app that generated some data based on some user inputs (and even generated PDFs), which solved a problem our customers were having and our devs didnt have the time to develop yet.

This obviously was a temporary tool we'd never let touch our github repo but it still very much worked and solved a niche problem. It even looked like our app because the LLM could consume screenshots to copy our designs.

I'm on board with vibe coding = non-maintainable, non-tested, mostly useless code by non-devs. But the plus side it will expose many many people to learn basic programming and fill many tiny gaps not solved by bigger more serious pieces of code. Especially once people start building infrastructure and tooling around these non-devs, like hosting, deployment, webhook integrations, etc.

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