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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)

#81

Post by raddan »

ryandv wrote: post #78
nomel wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

> 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. Why stop at software? AI will do this to pretty much every discipline and artform, from music and painting, to law and medicine. Learning, mastery, expertise, and craftsmanship are obsolete; there's no need to expend 10,000 hours develop…

Also, since none of us will have any expertise at all anymore, everything our AI makes will look great. No more “experts” pooping our parties. It’s gonna be awesome!

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

#82

Post by eddythompson80 »

Animats wrote: post #11

Here's a video of Dynamicland.[1] The textual description doesn't tell you much. It's still at the cool demo level, though. How do you scale this thing? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wa3nm0qcfM

Reminds me of Microsoft's "Surface/Table computing"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr1O917o4jI

> How do you scale this thing?

You release a tablet and call it Dynamicland? I think that's what Microsoft did, but don't quote me on that.

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

#83

Post by jgraettinger1 »

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…

But that’s not good. You don’t want Bob to be the gate keeper for why a process is the way it is.

In my experience working with agents helps eliminate that crap, because you have to bring the agent along as it reads your code (or process or whatever) for it to be effective. Just like human co-workers need to be brought along, so it’s not all on poor Bob.

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

#84

Post by dmix »

tines wrote: post #72
dmix wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becaus…

Do people actually learn when using these tools though? I mean, I’m sure they can be used to learn, just like TikTok could be used to read John Stuart Mill. But I doubt that’s what it’s going to be used for in real life.

If the barrier to entry is lower then more people will engage with it. Everything in life is about incentives. This is a hugely powerful tool for people working in the information industry, which is most people with office jobs. A sales person who can overcome a simple customer objection without a major time investment with devs is a sales person who makes more $$ and gets more promotions.

Most people in practice won't, they'll stick to what they know, but there's tons of semi-nerds on the edges who are going to flourish in the next decade. Which is great news for the economy.

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

#85

Post by smohare »

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…

[dead]

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

#86

Post by andsoitis »

gmueckl wrote: post #54
andsoitis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Modern Humans have been around and successful for 10s of thousands of years. This might be a genetic dead end in the relatively near short term, but I bet we and at least one branch of our descendants will live for many more 10s or 100s of thousands of years.

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

#87

Post by speed_spread »

comeondude wrote: post #48
edaemon wrote: 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…

Yes, it's an ever patient teacher that's willing to chop up any subject matter into bits that are just the correct shape and size for every brain, for as long and as deep as you're willing to go. That's definitely one effective way to use it.

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

#88

Post by comeondude »

llmthrow103 wrote: post #77
RangerScience wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean - going from “doable in a week with the right mindset” to “doable in a day when I’ve struggled before” is uhhh kinda worth being blown away by

Yeah, great, but also completely irrelevant. Is every post on Hacker News related to AI in any way a place to post anecdotes about AI?

I’m actually a huge fan of Brett Victor and I felt like he’s kinda missing the dynamic, adaptable nature of AI that allows non-technical people like me to finally access the system layer of computation for our creative ends.

In other words, in many ways, AI (or rather llms) is the very thing that Brett Victor has spent his whole career imagining and creating - a computing interface that closes gap between human imagination and creation. But here, he’s focusing on the negatives while neglecting, IMHO, the vast potential of AI to allow people to connect, create, and express themselves. As in truly having a PERSONAL computer.

At Dynamicland, he was attempting to build a system that non-technical people like me can interface in a way that makes sense to us.

Taking your unnecessarily disparaging microwave analogy - Using CHATGPT, I can understand it, reprogram it, and do fun stuff, like I don’t know - set up a basketball hoop that sets the timer based on how many shots I make, despite having limited or no technical background. Like I can tell chatgpt my crazy vision, and it will give me step by step approach, with proper resources, and respond in a way that I can grok to build this thing.

THIS is why I'm awestruck.

My anecdote is just my personal reaction to the post. Besides, what’s wrong with people expressing themselves freely here?

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

#89

Post by debugnik »

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…

Genuine question, how would you feel about reading the dual to your comment here?

"I'm a computer scientist who's always struggled to learn how to paint." "Last night I managed to create a gorgeous illustration with Stable Diffusion, and best part ... it was FUN!" "Art hasn't felt this fun for a long time."

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

#90

Post by smj-edison »

smj-edison wrote: post #66
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.

I just realized that the OP said they had already played around with real talk, but it's too late to edit: sorry for assuming that the printed code is sufficient! Was term mismatch one of the biggest issues you ran into, and if so, was it that the printed code didn't contain enough information?
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