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I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

evilgeniuslabs.ca

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Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

#91

Post by PolygonSheep »

jszymborski wrote: post #5
vunderba wrote: post #2

Why on earth would you use an AI-generated image [1] (let me be clear: POOR AI IMAGE) for the banner of this project? If you're going to use genai, you need to make sure it actually looks acceptable. Do at least one careful pass over it before publishing. Just look at the details: - The text on the book spines doesn’t even spell “Microsoft” correctly. - Dartmouth is spelled "Darmouth". SIGH. - The screenshot on the C…

It won't be long before people realize that having poor AI images looks worse than having no images, in the same way that having a reaction GIF every other paragraph of a blog post fell out of style or deeply generic and unillustrative clip art or stock photos of puzzle pieces or featureless-white-3D-figure-with-hard-hat-holding-question-mark. I sympathize with the motivations behind it, but it does look cruddy and c…

I'm at the point now where if there's an AI slop image at the top, I'll just hit the back button.

Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

#92

Post by PolygonSheep »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #3
vunderba wrote: post #2

Why on earth would you use an AI-generated image [1] (let me be clear: POOR AI IMAGE) for the banner of this project? If you're going to use genai, you need to make sure it actually looks acceptable. Do at least one careful pass over it before publishing. Just look at the details: - The text on the book spines doesn’t even spell “Microsoft” correctly. - Dartmouth is spelled "Darmouth". SIGH. - The screenshot on the C…

MICROSOFT MARL was definitely my all-time favorite product from Microsoft.

I was more of a MCOSOFT ΓΛAX guy myself. Never could quite wrap my head around MARL.

Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

#93

Post by giancarlostoro »

pjmlp wrote: post #90
giancarlostoro wrote: post #23

Any time VB comes up I repeat my same wishlist item. I would love for Microsoft to open source it, in any way, shape or form. I would love for the community to take a crack at adding things to VB6 like bugfixes, any missing features (my understanding is they don't own everything about VB6) and just overall general improvements, imagine VB6 with threading. I know its ancient, but it can still produce a native GUI appl…

VB.NET is open source, supports AOT, and there is little else that VB 6 does better, other than COM integration, which .NET was always a bit lower level https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn Now I bet what you mean is the graphical part, and yes that is only partial open source.

VB6 apps were compiled and did not need a special runtime. If Microsoft had never made .NET we would be in a different world where VB evolved to be a modern day Rust-like RAD language.

Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

#94

Post by DonHopkins »

queenkjuul wrote: post #83
DonHopkins wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's insufferably low effort banal human slop is your post, in stark contrast to the other posts written by actual human beings who cared enough to conscientiously put in the work to precisely and humorously criticize exactly what was lazy and careless and telling about that horrible illustration. Next time you feel the urge to post "AI slop", why don't you take the trivial time and minuscule effort of actually cop…

You're wasting an awful lot of words talking about AI slop

Well run them through an LLM yourself to summarize them if you're having so much trouble understanding, then take my advice and stop posting worthless unoriginal low effort human slop that doesn't contribute to the conversation yourself.

Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

#95

Post by pjmlp »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #93
pjmlp wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VB.NET is open source, supports AOT, and there is little else that VB 6 does better, other than COM integration, which .NET was always a bit lower level https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn Now I bet what you mean is the graphical part, and yes that is only partial open source.

VB6 apps were compiled and did not need a special runtime. If Microsoft had never made .NET we would be in a different world where VB evolved to be a modern day Rust-like RAD language.

Yes they did, every programming language needs a runtime, unless we're taking about Assembly. C also has a tiny one, even though most folks don't think so.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualst...

One of the .NET design ideas was exactly to have a common runtime between VB6+, J++ and C++, using COM, but the lawsuit from Sun made them pivot to something else.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190111203733/https://blogs.msd...

This idea came back as WinRT, which they completly messed up, and for me it was how .NET 1.0 should have been in first place.

https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...

Unfortunely that ship has sailed, given how bad UWP landed.

Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

#96

Post by queenkjuul »

hnlmorg wrote: post #89
queenkjuul wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stock photos are (generally) made by professionals, memes impart some social context. Can't say either about an AI image. So i absolutely hold an AI image in less esteem, especially when someone clearly just used the first draft spit out by the model where all of the text is wrong and the image doesn't even resemble what it purports to illustrate.

> Stock photos are (generally) made by professionals GenAI models are made by professionals. But in both our cases, it’s a different set of professionals to the ones who chose which images to use in their articles. > memes impart some social context The “social context” here is just regurgitating an unrelated viral joke. I’d hardly say that requires more respect of the readers than a purpose generated image that is i…

No if they used a bad stock photo it wouldn't be worth noticing and if it were an offensive meme it would have been chosen with intent. A bad AI image is so bad to be worth noticing and serves no other purpose than to fill up space hoping nobody notices how bad it is (which, yes, is what stock image are for, but those are made by IMAGE MAKING PROFESSIONALS so even the bad ones are inoffensive. Doctors and mechanics are both professionals so you'll get Dialysis from a Jiffy Lube?)

Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

#97

Post by queenkjuul »

DonHopkins wrote: post #94
queenkjuul wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're wasting an awful lot of words talking about AI slop

Well run them through an LLM yourself to summarize them if you're having so much trouble understanding, then take my advice and stop posting worthless unoriginal low effort human slop that doesn't contribute to the conversation yourself.

I didn't say i couldn't understand

Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

#98

Post by hnlmorg »

queenkjuul wrote: post #96
hnlmorg wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stock photos are (generally) made by professionals GenAI models are made by professionals. But in both our cases, it’s a different set of professionals to the ones who chose which images to use in their articles. > memes impart some social context The “social context” here is just regurgitating an unrelated viral joke. I’d hardly say that requires more respect of the readers than a purpose generated image that is i…

No if they used a bad stock photo it wouldn't be worth noticing and if it were an offensive meme it would have been chosen with intent. A bad AI image is so bad to be worth noticing and serves no other purpose than to fill up space hoping nobody notices how bad it is (which, yes, is what stock image are for, but those are made by IMAGE MAKING PROFESSIONALS so even the bad ones are inoffensive. Doctors and mechanics a…

> No if they used a bad stock photo it wouldn't be worth noticing

Surely that depends on how bad the stock photo is? I’ve seen plenty of people comment on bad stock photos in the past. And plenty more moan about the use of memes in articles.

> and if it were an offensive meme it would have been chosen with intent.

…which is better why? It’s still offensive. Except now you saying the author being a dick is better than an author failing to use a decent image generation model?

Personally I’d rather scroll past a crappy image than an offensive one.

> A bad AI image is so bad to be worth noticing and serves no other purpose than to fill up space hoping nobody notices how bad it is

Exactly. Bad images. BAD!!

You’re comparing good stock photos with bad AI images and arguing that AI is the problem. And thus we are right back to my original point where I said it’s the editorial process that failed by allowing a bad image, regardless of the source.

> Doctors and mechanics are both professionals so you'll get Dialysis from a Jiffy Lube?)

Doctors don’t build dialysis machines so your analogy is wrong.

Your whole argument here ignores the fact that gen ai has been used in reporting for a while now; and used well.

This image in this specific article is crappy. But it’s also not representative of all AI images in all articles. Its crappiness is an outlier rather than an example that proves your argument about the ethics of AI generated images.

Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

#100

Post by DonHopkins »

queenkjuul wrote: post #97
DonHopkins wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well run them through an LLM yourself to summarize them if you're having so much trouble understanding, then take my advice and stop posting worthless unoriginal low effort human slop that doesn't contribute to the conversation yourself.

I didn't say i couldn't understand

If you could understand, then you wouldn't post stuff like that.
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