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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Well, not exactly. For example, for a game I was working on I asked an LLM for a mathematical formula to align 3D normals. Then I couldn’t decipher what it wrote so I just asked it to write the code for me to do it. I can understand it in its code form, and it slid into my game’s code just fine.

    Yeah, it wasn’t seamless, but that’s the frustrating hype part of LLMs. They very much won’t replace an actual programmer. But for me, working as the sole developer who actually knows how to code but doesn’t know how to do much of the math a game requires? It’s a godsend. And I guess somewhere deep in some forum somebody’s written this exact formula as a code snippet, but I think it actually just converted the formula into code and that’s something quite useful.

    I mean, I don’t think you and I disagree on the limits of LLMs here. Obviously that formula it pulled out was something published before, and of course I had to direct it. But it’s these emergent solutions you can draw out of it where I find the most use. But of course, you need to actually know what you’re doing both on the code side and when it comes to “talking” to the LLM, which is why it’s nowhere near useful enough to empower users to code anything with some level of complexity without a developer there to guide it.


  • jcg@halubilo.socialtoProgrammer Humor@programming.devTradeoffs
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    14 days ago

    You can get decent results from AI coding models, though…

    …as long as somebody who actually knows how to program is directing it. Like if you tell it what inputs/outputs you want it can write a decent function - even going so far as to comment it along the way. I’ve gotten O1 to write some basic web apps with Node and HTML/CSS without having to hold its hand much. But we simply don’t have the training, resources, or data to get it to work on units larger than that. Ultimately it’d have to learn from large scale projects, and have the context size to be able to hold if not the entire project then significant chunks of it in context and that would require some very beefy hardware.





  • I think mint is crazy better these days compared to 10 years ago, and it probably just came down to “we want to be user friendly to those who need their hands held” crashing into “actual users who need their hand held are trying it out.” 10 years ago, I think there simply wasn’t enough interested in Linux outside of Linux circles to properly test and figure things out, not to mention the strides the software itself has made in supporting more hardware more seamlessly.

    The thing about RTFM is that users don’t, and the users that stuff like Mint is geared towards is those who when asked to read a wiki page, will simply give up. Windows has a cottage industry of people who do various things to make it easier for that kind of user. For example, just installing Windows on a device for you (albeit with bloatware usually) complete with all the drivers for your hardware. For most of the hardware on a laptop (audio, internet, HIDs, USB), that’ll have you set for life without having to touch anything and for the graphics that’ll at least have you set for several years without having to touch anything. And it’s not like Linux doesn’t have this level of support, it’s just that Windows has this level of support for consumers and Linux typically has it relegated to the enterprise sphere.

    That being said, it’s insane how easy it is now to just install Mint, or PopOS, or even Ubuntu and have a working system. But most users don’t even install their Windows, much less a completely foreign OS.













  • Your freedom to do those things under capitalism is wholly bound by your existing wealth, and wealth begets wealth. When your parents are well off, you can get into good schools, get better education, and ultimately get a better job and, really, be a better worker bringing more wealth into the already existing pool of wealth your family had. Those who have been disenfranchised by way of things like eminent domain, redlining, or the straight up prosecution of them and their fellow men simply don’t have that option to rise up. They don’t even have the opportunity to try and fail, they’ve failed by their very existence. At a macro scale, once you’ve reached the top (e.x. Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.) you have the resources to not only out-do any of the competition but to sell products at a loss to starve your competition and bully them into submission, which big companies do all the time instead of investing in better products. It’s just good business.

    Circumstance plays a lot into how much wealth you start out with and how much wealth you end up being able to accrue, so while it’s nice being not even at the top but even just the middle, it’s important to have the mindfulness to know that there are those below you who don’t have the same freedoms, and they’re not there because their businesses did poorly. Some of them are, but most are simply victims of greater powers stealing their capital.