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102 Following
161 Posts
Decades of experience lurking on the internet.

My biggest problem with the concept of LLMs, even if they weren’t a giant plagiarism laundering machine and disaster for the environment, is that they introduce so much unpredictability into computing. I became a professional computer toucher because they do exactly what you tell them to. Not always what you wanted, but exactly what you asked for.

LLMs turn that upside down. They turn a very autistic do-what-you-say, say-what-you-mean commmunication style with the machine into a neurotypical conversation talking around the issue, but never directly addressing the substance of problem.

In any conversation I have with a person, I’m modeling their understanding of the topic at hand, trying to tailor my communication style to their needs. The same applies to programming languages and frameworks. If you work with a language the way its author intended it goes a lot easier.

But LLMs don’t have an understanding of the conversation. There is no intent. It’s just a mostly-likely-next-word generator on steroids. You’re trying to give directions to a lossily compressed copy of the entire works of human writing. There is no mind to model, and no predictability to the output.

If I wanted to spend my time communicating in a superficial, neurotypical style my autistic ass certainly wouldn’t have gone into computering. LLMs are the final act of the finance bros and capitalists wrestling modern technology away from the technically literate proletariat who built it.

@BasicAppleGuy looks like a smurf
I spent a very long time getting high-res screenshots of Pages on Lion and Catalina with a non-Retina laptop, and also pulling quotes out of videos. Please do not make me regret it. https://pxlnv.com/blog/window-chrome-of-our-discontent/
The Window Chrome of Our Discontent

In a WWDC 2011 session, Dan Schimpf explained some of the goals of the refreshed design for Aqua in Mac OS X Lion were “meant to focus the user attention on the active window content”. This sentiment was echoed by John Siracusa in his review of Lion for Ars Technica: Apple says that its goal […]

This really resonated with me. I also grew up in the 8-bit era, and vividly recall the excitement of participating in the dawn of the digital revolution, creating code and pixel graphics in a dimly lit youngster room, before the introduction of the public internet, and with great expectations regarding the future of computing…

https://www.jamesdrandall.com/posts/the_thing_i_loved_has_changed

#GameDev #RetroGaming #RetroComputing #RetroGames #VintageComputing #retro #TeamHoi #history #commodore #C64 #amiga #IT #tech #vintage #nostalgia

I Started Programming When I Was 7. I'm 50 Now, and the Thing I Loved Has Changed | James Randall

I still love developing but the shifts that AI have brought are tectonic and are forcing me to re-evaluate my own relationship to building things

James Randall
@davatron5000 Great post. I'm also saddened by the fact that with AI we are losing what attracted me to programming in the first place, which is determinism. That's what (used to) differentiate computers from everything else in our lives. :/
@simonbs This is very well put.
I keep hearing people advocating that AI is here to stay and new generations of programmers will naturally end up embracing it, like any other tool... and all I can think of is how when I was a teenager, I only had access to a crappy Windows computer and I managed to learn how to program with free resources on the web: tutorials, early screencasts, etc.
I would have never been able to even start if it required a $20 subscription (let alone $200)

This is how big companies quietly steal control from users. Youtube search options then → now

#YouTube #Search

These icons are awful.
New blog post! A close look at Tahoe menu icons. With 109 illustrations! https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons

Looking at the first principles of icon design—and how Apple failed to apply all of them in macOS Tahoe

tonsky.me