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I'm Archiving Picocrypt

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Re: I'm Archiving Picocrypt

#71

Post by FergusArgyll »

KaiserPro wrote: post #54
neom wrote: post #37

https://github.com/Picocrypt/Picocrypt/issues/134#issuecomme... This to me is the crux of the whole thing. Almost like a knitter throwing away their needles because they saw a loom.

I mean your analogy is almost there. The loom is pretty old. What your grasping for is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-loom_riots Where a precipitous drop in earning power, combined with longer working hours, high inflation and large companies making people unemployed cause large social unrest. And yeah, I can see why they rioted.

Yeah, life has just been on a steady decline since 1826. Who wants all this food and medicine anyway

Re: I'm Archiving Picocrypt

#72

Post by andai »

roenxi wrote: post #57
rikafurude21 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think many people would be excited at the thought of going from handcrafted artisan knitting to babying machines in the knitting factory. You need a certain type of autism to be into the latter.

Fortunately this is the software industry. We've got a lot of those autists and that automating urge is the best part about software. If someone don't like the idea of sitting around babysitting factories of machines they certainly shouldn't go into DevOps. It would be safest to just avoid programming in general, given how much of the industry centres on figuring out how to deploy huge amounts of computing power in a…

Yeah, the whole industry is just speedrunning Factorio at this point.

Re: I'm Archiving Picocrypt

#73

Post by nicoburns »

kevingadd wrote: post #69
tromp wrote: post #67

How does "a very small (hence Pico), very simple, yet very secure encryption tool" come to depend on OpenGL, threatening its future on MacOS?

If you're using a portable library that needs to render graphics on mac, it's probably using OpenGL to do it unless it has a platform-specific backend.

Historically, yes. These days it might well be using wgpu.

Re: I'm Archiving Picocrypt

#74

Post by worldsavior »

epolanski wrote: post #25
raincole wrote: post #15

I don't get it. (I'm not trying to throw shades at the author. I know they have no obligation to maintain an open source project. I'm simply having a hard time gasping what's happening.)

Seems like the author is abandoning software because in his opinion due to AI explosion employers don't care anymore about code quality and only quality. I don't get it either, because that has always been the case, thus most of his post is borderline non sense. Imo, what happened is that he took the opportunity of him entering academia to vent some stuff and quit maintaining his project.

He doesn't have interest in the project anymore. He didn't have a long time, and now that he stopped with software development and gone into the academia- he certainly doesn't have interest. Is that hard to get?

He explained the reasons he went into the academia, which is because of the AI, and AI is not the reason he stopped with development.

Re: I'm Archiving Picocrypt

#75

Post by chromehearts »

whilenot-dev wrote: post #24
reasonableklout wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a nice message and I sympathize with the frustration, but the critique falls flat with the author's decision to pivot into AI research.

> Advancements in intelligent AI and LLMs get me excited. Large and centered on the authors website: https://evansu.com/

What a hypocrite lmao

Re: I'm Archiving Picocrypt

#79

Post by immibis »

uludag wrote: post #65

I've felt similar to the author, a sort of despair that the only point of writing software now is to prop up the valuation of AI companies, that quality no longer matters, etc. Then I realized that nothings stopping me from writing software how I want and feel is best . I've stopped using LLMs completely and couldn't be happier. I'm not even struggling at work or feeling like I'm behind. I work on a number of persona…

This is also a good opportunity to remember that MIT is not a strong enough open source license, and if you want to prevent corporations making money off your work, make it AGPL or even SSPL, plus a statement that AI training creates a derivative work (the latter may or may not have any legal effect).

MIT is a donation of your labour to corporations. With a stronger license, at least they're more likely to contribute back or to pay you for a looser license.

Re: I'm Archiving Picocrypt

#80

Post by jvanderbot »

Honestly I feel the same.

I'm holding out hope that there will always be boutique/edge software to be written, which requires enough design and care to be mentally challenging and engaging - the craftsmanship kind.

When AlphaGo was announced, I had to keep telling people that "It's not like computers win at Go, it's just that we now have a tool that makes us way better at Go". If an alien race showed up and challenged us to Go to save the species, would we use a Go player or a AlphaGo, if we had to choose?

The problem is LLMs aren't like that, because software isn't like Go. And, they really are annoying to use, frustrating to redirect all the time, and generally cannot do what you want precisely, without putting in more mental energy to provide context and decompose further than you'd need to do the damn thing yourself. And then you lose an hour/two of flow, which is the reward for the whole process.

But at certain times they are a godsend and they have completely replaced some of the more boring parts of my job. I wouldn't want to lose them, not at all.

Like the author, I don't think we're heading to a healthy balance where LLMs help us be better at our job. I do think the hype is going in the wrong direction, and I do worry for the state of our field (Or at least the _ideals_ of our field). Call me naive, but I also thought it mattered what the code was.

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