I review most of the code I get LLMs to write and actually I think the main challenge is finding the right chunk size for each task you ask it to do.
As I use it more I gain more intuition about the kinds of problems it can handle on it's, vs those that I need to work on breaking down into smaller pieces before setting it loose.
Without research and planning agents are mostly very expensive and slow to get things done, if they even can. However with the right initial breakdown and specification of the work they are incredibly fast.
In vitro is great for publication though. If I out bleach and Alzheimer's plaques in a petri dish I bet I could publish that sodium hypochlorite treats Alzheimer's
The TUI hype seems like nostalgia for COBOL mainframe apps that most people have never even used. A sort of secondhand cyberpunk role play with zero focus on actual UX.
Also if TUIs are so great, why isn't this a TUI app?
Have you ever watched someone USE those COBOL TUIs? Everyone from airline ticket agents, to local governments, to folks at Home Depot while looking up inventory. They could fly through menus and accomplish things. I remember when Best Buy switched to a Windows-based experience. It was terrible. Simply adding a mouse+windowing experience slowed everything way down. I saw it first hand at Target too. They went from an OS/2-based TUI to Windows NT. I know there'll always be those folks that think we're all just trying to play "leet Haxorz", but there's just something about those systems that people deeply connected with.
I personally think the opencode and kilo CLI have great UX, certainly better (and easier to use) than the web versions of both.
A lot of the recent TUI apps are really not old-school in any way. Not all apps need the feature-set of a browser engine. And compared to native mac/linux desktop apps, TUIs get cross-platform support by default.
> Also if TUIs are so great, why isn't this a TUI app?
Jobs’ complaint wasn’t actionscript the language, it was the security and performance nightmare of the Flash runtime.
Though it’s hard to imagine what the web would look like if the language had become the standard. JS is a pain but AS was even less suitable for general purpose compute.
And at least the "performance nightmare" is an irony from today's perspective as the Flash player wasn't actually slow at all! It was the incapability of the Safari browser to handle plugins in a good way and on mobile devices. Today's implementations of mobile application, JavaScript heavy applications and websites are much much more performance heavy.
I came from a poor background and stole pretty much all the textbooks I used to learn programming as a kid. I also stole all the music I listened to while studying them. Is everything I write slop for the same reason?
No. You're a human, who went through real life experiences. You learned, developed as a human being. You made mistakes and grew from them. You did what you have to do to advance. What you output has intrinsic value because of all this. I argue that even when you roll your face on your keyboard, the output is more valuable than ten pages of slop output from an LLM, since it's human, with all the history, experience, emotions and character which came before it.
I don't know why this got downvoted. I've already been so frustrated by HN LIDAR mindsets but holy shit.
Human society exists because we value humans, full stop. The easiest way to "solve" all of humanity's problems is to simply say that humans aren't valuable. Sometimes it feels like we're conceding a ridiculous amount of ground on that basic principle every year - one more human value gone because it "doesn't matter", so hey, we've obviously made progress!
Agreed. I think that sometimes people on HN lose sight of what is actually important, which is human flourishing. The other day there was someone arguing that the best thing to do to fix loneliness problems in society is to remove the human need for socializing. Which... is certainly one way to fix the problem, I guess, but completely missed the point. The point is not to fix a mismatch between essential human desires and what we can attain, the point is to work on fulfilling those desires! Just something goes with nerd autism, I guess.
> I don't know why this got downvoted. I've already been so frustrated by HN LIDAR mindsets but holy shit
The extreme sides (proponents, opponents) are clear, opposites, and fight each other. More nuanced takes get buried as droplets in a bucket. Likely a goal.
> Human society exists because we value humans, full stop.
Call me cynic, but I do not believe every human being agrees with this sentiment. From HR acting as if humans are resources, to human beings being dehumanized as workers, civilians, cannon fodder, and... well, the product. Every time human rights are violated, and we do not stand up to it, we lose.
I have a very simple question as human right: the right for a human being to know the other side is a human being yes or no, and if not: to speak gratis (no additional fee allowed) to a human being instead. Futhermore, ML must always cite the used sources, and ML programmer is responsible for mistake. This would increase insurance costs so much, that LLM's in public would die, but SLM's could thrive.
>Human society exists because we value humans, full stop.
Eh, human society exists because it is an emergent behavior of the evolutionary advantage afforded at the time of adoption by the human species. There is on iron rule stating that it must continue into the future, or even that it can exist into the future.
More so, the value of a human has wildly fluctuated over history and culture. The village chief, nobles, the king were all high value humans. The villagers would be middle to low value, and others may be considered no value.
The industrial age began to change this some as value started to move from the merchant class to the villager class as many high production jobs needed less and less training to complete. With industrialization businesses running machines and production lines needed as many people as they could get. Still human rights were hard fought in places like America where labor wars broke out.
In the modern US we've setup a dangerous set of idealism that will most likely end in disaster because they are in conflict with general human values. That is the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps", "Any collective action is communism and communism will turn you into a pillar of salt if you dare look at it", and "greed is good". Couple that with TV media and social media owned by rich billionaires you're not going to see much serious opposition to these ideals.
But if/as labor loses it's values, so will the humans that performed that labor. After decades of optimizing human society for maximal capital extraction, values are dead, and the ever present thought police owned by the rich will make sure you don't cause too much trouble by resurrecting them.
AI written absolutely is copyrightable. There are just some unresolved tensions around where the lines are and how much and what kind of involvement humans need to have in the process.
I think the problem here is that an AI is not a legal entity. It doesn't matter if you as individual run an AI that takes the source, dumps out a spec that you then feed into another AI. The legal liability lies with the operator of the AI, the original copyleft license was granted to a person, not to a robot.
Now if you had 2 entirely distinct humans involved in the process that might work though.
Electron is very easy to deliver a good quality app for everything but absolute power users.
Yes it's horribly slow but it enables rapid experimentation and it's easy to deliver the wide range of UI integrations you are likely to want in a chat-esq experience.
It’s not even horribly slow. It works fine. It’s just a chat program. It’s the right trade off for the job.
Doing more work for no reason is stupid even if you the have money of a small nation.
The inevitable differences between platforms you get with all native everything isn’t a good user experience, either. Now you need to duplicate your documentation and support pages and have support staff available to address every platform. And what’s the payoff? Saving 80MB of RAM? Gaining milliseconds of latency that Joe Business will never notice as he’s hunt and pecking his way through the interface?
I thought we were done with Electron hate articles. It’s so 2018 to complain about it. It’s like talking about millennials and their skinny jeans. Yawn.
I'm dealing with MS Teams, which is for me a chat and video app. It uses 2GB of RAM, which is more thand my local postgresql. It must sit there in the background wasting 2/16 of my laptop or people can't reach me.
And if MS stopped randomly moving things around in the UI with no benefit whatsoever, their documentation could be usefull instead of telling me where I could find some setting 3 years ago.
As I use it more I gain more intuition about the kinds of problems it can handle on it's, vs those that I need to work on breaking down into smaller pieces before setting it loose.
Without research and planning agents are mostly very expensive and slow to get things done, if they even can. However with the right initial breakdown and specification of the work they are incredibly fast.
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