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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)

#91

Post by wwweston »

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…

So your understanding is that the chief value a software engineer provides is experience utilizing a specific toolchain/compiler/language to generate code. Is that correct?

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

#92

Post by rtkwe »

smj-edison wrote: post #49
rtkwe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah he's put out a fair number of videos and the whole idea makes more sense there or if you can manage to visit in person. I think even if you could squeeze down an LLM and get it to run in realtalk I don't think it fits with the radical simplicity model they're going for. LLMs are fundamentally opaque, we have no idea why they output what they do in the end and can only twiddle the prompt knobs as a user which is…

I believe it runs on stock Linux, but it's an operating system in the sense that it multiplexes tasks and facilitates IPC. The closest analogy I can think of is something like a lisp machine or Smalltalk, where the line between program and OS is really blurry. Also, if you haven't heard of folk computer[1] as a viable alternative, I'd highly suggest checking it out! I'm one of the contributors, and it's definitely no…

I'll have to take a look and scrounge up a decent projector to try. The other Bret project I was actually even more interested in was the robotics lab project when I was on a big robotics kick in the 2010s.

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

#93

Post by tines »

dmix wrote: post #84
tines wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Engaging with it is different than "learning" though, that's specifically what I was talking about. LLMs seem to be interesting because they're a technology that doesn't encourage you to learn. I know people who talk to ChatGPT, copy code, run it, paste errors into ChatGPT, copy output, run it, etc. They're not really learning anything, they're a glorified console through which ChatGPT can interact with their machine. I'm not saying that that's exactly what happened in your story. I just think that learning will be the exception, not the rule.

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

#94

Post by tartoran »

deadbabe wrote: post #65
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…

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…

> 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.

Except that the expectation of them is going to be higher and higher possibly with a downward pressure on compensation. I guess it'll find equilibrium somewhere eventually.

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

#95

Post by tartoran »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #79
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…

Some people see it as a political identity issue. One person told me the other day that for the rest of time people will see using an AI as equivalent to crossing a picket line.

Well, if you use LLMs to write a book and claim to be a writer that is crossing a line. A writer doesn't just write the book, they do a lot of thinking over the concepts of the book and their writing style is somewhat unique to themselves. It's deceiving to prentend you're not using AI when you are. And if you are that's fine as long as you disclose it.

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

#96

Post by throwaway328 »

comeondude wrote: post #88
llmthrow103 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 imagi…

> 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.

To "grok" something is to understand it on a deep, fundamental level. Following a checklist from an LLM and the thing you're doing eventually working isn't grokking.

To be clear, I'm very glad that you and others can throw together new projects. Your excitement seems genuine, and more excitement in the world is good. And perhaps you'll be one of the miniscule minority who will use LLMs to really get to a deeper level of understanding with new things.

But I wonder if your excitement may be misleading you here and making it harder for you to grok Bret Victor's post - on any level. I don't think Victor is interested in computing in the way you think he is. There's a world of difference between being able to cobble a web project together, and the kinds of philosophical shifts a project like dynamicland is proposing and enacting.

In the interest of people expressing themselves freely, I'd go so far as to say it's particularly surprising to read all this from "an artist". There was a time when being an artist implied the person had reflected and read and thought about larger perspectives across a range of subjects - philosophy, science, religion, etc.

Here, in this instance, I can't help feeling there's some crunchy irony in the fact that a deeply radical (scientifically, artistically, technologically, socially) project like dynamicland is met by an artist excited to be able to plug web services into each other, strongly claiming from the very heart of the cultural slop wars, that the dynamicland people might be confused and maybe LLMs is the real answer.

Respectfully, consider that maybe the perspective from which they're viewing the problem is simply much deeper than what you've been able to grasp so far. I don't mean it disparagingly or cynically, in fact it's great news, you've vistas to explore here!

I suggest reading more from dynamicland directly, and bret's website too, a few of bret's talks, alan kay is very good, there's tons of stuff if you get into it. Don't neglect the history of computing, it's full of amazing ideas.

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

#97

Post by throwaway328 »

throwaway328 wrote: post #96
comeondude wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 imagi…

> 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. To "grok" something is to understand it on a deep, fundamental level. Following a checklist from an LLM and the thing you're doing eventually working isn't grokking. To be clear, I'm very glad…

I'm following my own advice there at the end and browsing around a bit more, and one book dynamicland links to on their bookshelf (https://dynamicland.org/2024/Roots/) is "Tools for Thought" (https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/) which has this amazing blurb which reminded me of this thread:

> Tools for Thought is an exercise in retrospective futurism; that is, I wrote it in the early 1980s, attempting to look at what the mid 1990s would be like. My odyssey started when I discovered Xerox PARC and Doug Engelbart and realized that all the journalists who had descended upon Silicon Valley were missing the real story. Yes, the tales of teenagers inventing new industries in their garages were good stories. But the idea of the personal computer did not spring full-blown from the mind of Steve Jobs. Indeed, the idea that people could use computers to amplify thought and communication, as tools for intellectual work and social activity, was not an invention of the mainstream computer industry nor orthodox computer science, nor even homebrew computerists. If it wasn't for people like J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Bob Taylor, Alan Kay, it wouldn't have happened. But their work was rooted in older, equally eccentric, equally visionary, work, so I went back to piece together how Boole and Babbage and Turing and von Neumann — especially von Neumann — created the foundations that the later toolbuilders stood upon to create the future we live in today. You can't understand where mind-amplifying technology is going unless you understand where it came from.

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

#98

Post by atleastoptimal »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #62
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…

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 billi…

It’s not bait. HN is far more bearish and critical of AI and LLM’s than it is of other new technologies.
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