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If you think LLMs are useless, I think you need to hang out with more non-tech people. Everyone of them I know (artists, blue collar, bio researchers, ...) is delighted to be able to build little apps and ask how to do a thing in excel and build firmwares for their art installations, replace their square intake form workflow with a little bit help from my side.
This is why I was so bullish on LLMs all this time, while the edges were rough. We're past that now.
@mnl i am conflicted, as this will be so massively used for disinformation, wage suppression and other bad things. i really doubt this will set us free even a little. you could argue this is a culture thing and not per se the tech, but then look where does this come from. i’m not sure there is much reason for optimism despite the positive potential of the tech
@zauberlaus the developer class definitely needs to wake up regarding labor rights, 💯. But you can subvert technology, and programmers being like “let me gatekeep making computers do things, so I can continue making 6 figures at faang” leaves a sour taste in my mouth. If a company fires 80% of its workers, didn’t they in a way create 4 competitors? Ironically enough, SV is kind of in a “omg I can build a 1B business with just me and Claude code” craze and some people are realizing “oh so can everybody”. I have no idea where that leaves us.
One thing I know is that you don’t megatons of compute to write solid software, I barely scratch 50% usage on my codex plan, and the end user parts (the malleable front I expose) I can generate with 7B models . And once it’s generated you don’t need the LLM anymore anyway.
Being able to replace photoshop for a friend by building a little UI to adjust some settings however, or helping my gf sever from square and stripe, pretty positive.
@mnl @zauberlaus What rubs me the wrong way is that I think it's more open and free when you can install a Compiler on any old thing, and start learning how to code. The knowledge is there for free, The only thing you have to do is learn something. And you might understand why things are build in the way they are.
On the other hand you have to pay money to a company for the use of the hardware, model and tools so you can get an app where you do not know what it makes it tick.
That's Gatekeeping
@Blickfeldkurier @zauberlaus I'm not sure I understand. That's still true if not more so now, and there are models you can run on your machine too.To me, that's like saying that compilers and Borland are gatekeeping computer architecture and assembly.
@mnl @zauberlaus How many People run their own Models? From my Point of view, admittedly I might be wrong, few people run their own or could. Most people will use the latest from $Company because they heard it gets good results.
If you learn to code, installing the things you need is not the blocker, installing an ide is not hard but on the other hand, for the claim that ai lets anyone write apps without any knowledge and then think they are able to install the whole ai stack?
Does this help?
@Blickfeldkurier @zauberlaus my girlfriend is not going to learn how to code, she has zero interest. My artist friend is not going to become an embedded engineer. But both can now make the devices do what they want without being stuck with squares form builder for $80/month or fighting with Arduino instead of focusing on their installation.
“Make the fans slowly blow up while the leds play a pink flashing pattern” generates a couple of lines of JS that run in a JS VM on a distributed mesh of esp32s and said JS controls the realtime stuff underneath.
It’s up to “us” to provide said infrastructure and base software. That I can build an embedded JS port with custom mesh network and time sync, with realtime animation library for led strips and a full featured web Ui, ble iPhone app, on a Sunday afternoon while mostly shooting the shit with my friends, is quite incredible.
Said artist friend can easily install ollama on their laptop and generate the couple of needed JS locally.
