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Comment by skydhash | Hacker News Reader

> However, a lot of productivity is going into things like that. Have you always been bothered by the limitations of Grafana? You can generate another dashboarding solution that works best for you. [...] The browser sandbox is limited? Make a desktop app, make a language, make an OS, make a kernel.

This is one of the core reason that I dislike the LLM hyping. People are just reinventing stuff and when you ask them, it's actually a very subjective reason. Ok, anyone can do what they want with their time, the issue is that they want people to follow in their steps.

Not saying that you need a novel idea to be worthy, but those random projects have no guarantees behind them other than some cursory testing. All software have bugs, but I can't interact with something that is randomly built.

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There is surely a tremendous amount of waste and noise right now. But does it _actually_ matter what the code looks like for a desktop app that’s useful to a small handful of people? Every single implementation has at least one person who thinks it’s dog shit, no matter how correct or perfect it is. We have to get past this. If you really can’t stand it, build the thing yourself or some deterministic rails to reel it in.

And, there are also people who know what they’re doing building things they couldn’t before.

This situation is a net positive, and not too different than before. It’s up to you to navigate the noise.

> does it _actually_ matter what the code looks like for a desktop app that’s useful to a small handful of people

Not really. But equally, I imagine most people have a similar experience of software development to me - complex, messy and confusing code also often has poor performance and a high rate of bugs.

I don't see the problem.

I am one of those people that reinvents the wheels because external ones don't fit my use cases.

The fact I can now fork any software and do these changes I always wanted but had no time to is amazing to me.

I do not pretend to sell it or share it, as it is de facto void of any value whatsoever.

> I am one of those people that reinvents the wheels because external ones don't fit my use cases

That’s OK, but I’ve yet to see someone articulating what exactly doesn’t work in the old product. It’s always “Let’s rewrite or reinvent 90% of it, then add a minuscule variation”. The variation may be interesting, but the reinvent is what’s make it untouchable as no one (including the author) has time to ensure things are right.

A patch or a plugin is ok, but not a whole new project with dubious claims.

> what exactly doesn’t work in the old product

Assumptions. I've rebuilt a number of inference engines to run on windows and unify the dependency venv to last version to save space, unrolling model blocks so they fit in my 16gb card etc. A lot of thing thay I was locked out are possible now as i am no longer held back by invariants decided by someone else, and because I do not have to spend time to get things done. I've changed games to have a less grindy loop, added features, or making learning them easier. Ive fixed drivers, patched versions, brought dlss5 to game weren't supposed to have it

It's not ground breaking, but its liberating.

Why do you care, it's not like anybody's shoving it down your computer.

I think the point argued is that the hype tells us AI is worth a shit ton of money (see anthropic/openai/etc valuations) but that a lot of the benefit is in economically marginal use i.e. make some dev's life a little bit comfier.

"Someone is wrong on the stock market." Isn't there an xkcd about that?

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> Why do you care, it's not like anybody's shoving it down your computer

They are trying to get in every opensource projects, increasing the burden of maintainers. And once a ban is announced, they’re here protesting.

I agree. I think if everyone doing that is doing it on their computer like you're then it wouldn't be a problem.

When other people start doing that to other teams at work, other people in open source, other people in professional settings, etc it becomes a problem for various reasons. The idea that I'm gonna gift you with a 75k lines of python to "just run it" and ask your agent to hack on it might be fine (who cares as you put it). Now scale that to 47 of such projects (a month)

it's wasting limited earth resources

Eh, I could be quite specific and detailed about the "things that don't work" that are motivating me. Because most of my prompts require actively thinking about at least one of them.

you know that you can reinvent the language that youre talking. but the value of common language is that you can use it to interact with other people. same with software its the synergy of common understanding.

A major benefit of LLMs is in expanding scope of things you can do without involving other people.

Communication and coordination are bottlenecks.

You wont be able to do everything alone, and with llm you can push the barrier so far that eventually when you will need to communicate, no one will understand what youre talking about :)

There will be no common framework to build on. Like imagine talking now to someone from ancient rome, they will not have an understanding for what most of everyday words you are using today.

Fortunately, we already invented the universal translator :).

its not about translation. its about the concepts. there was no concept or microbe, elcticity, gravity integral, rational number etc. so imagine everyone now would have totally different concepts that only they understand. how do you communicate without common ground.

You build one.

For some things, you'll need to build a working framework from grounds up. Electricity or more complex maths would be an example. For some, it might be enough to repurpose the existing framework they already have. For example, microbes: if you're trying to communicate something about health and hygiene, chances are, the other side already has a half-decent framework built around malevolent spirits or taint, that amounts to the same thing in practice.

Or, just tell the universal translator to ELI5 it to the other person :). Or "explain like they're a caveman". Our UTs are fully capable of translating concepts between conceptual frameworks.

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