I'm a seeing-eye dog for a computer

cclaytonwramsey 4 days ago 5 commentsRead Article on claytonwramsey.com

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Discussion (5 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

hspeiser•about 2 hours ago

I completely understand this. I’ve worked on robot hands and 5.6/Fable 5 were practically useless at helping me debug anything visually.

What I have found super useful actually is having models make a interactive 3d viewer in which I use move / highlight / paint (soft body painting directly onto the geometry for issues and different colors mean different failures). This gives a much better way to communicate the physical relationships and positions that are hard to get across in a labeled screenshot.

Its for sure still a lot of manual work so the "seeing-eye dog" description definitely holds. But I have found that after a couple of examples with the extra context the model gets much better at handling the problem and becomes useful.

SadErn•about 2 hours ago

I like to think of training and improving AIs as bringing freedom to the world. The useless toil and labor associated with rebuilding the same solutions into different contexts is finally at an end.

Coding was never the reward. Acting as a translator for a machine is far worse than allowing the machine to solve the mundane parts and leave you with bigger building blocks to play with.

After 25 years I have to confess I hated being a software engineer. It felt like grinding in a video game.

Now I can finally create and innovate at the speed of thought, and I'm very grateful to have this technology now.

anonzzzies•41 minutes ago

For me code still is the reward; I made and make my fortunes with boring code people on HN say no one needs or wants, my hobby is, and has been for 45 years, writing, perfecting and optimizing code manually until I find it perfect. I have been working for 10 years on a programming language and OS (with niche 2 dbs that are now prod quality and we use) and those are the best moment of my day, I couldn’t care less what anyone thinks of it or ever uses it. But the lessons learned do flow into LLMs to write the boring code and I can say that our million$ paying LoB code can handle 100s req/s on shite hardware and even if the LLM did a crap job. Which is almost 100s times more than the client will ever needs.

burnoutdv•about 1 hour ago

You got nothing.

Giant corpos hold every sliver of your so called freedom, you dont innovate, you repeat what others created before you. You use a tool that shackles your thoughts and creativity in a never before seen way, what you perceive is an illusion of liberty that is no present. Without others you are nothing and they can take it away any seconds, you are an addict, not an innovator.

hypfer•14 minutes ago

I can see where you're coming from, and I share the sentiment and resentment to a large degree, but I think you might be not doing reality justice.

It is true that closed weights models are a big issue. It is also true that LLM-generated solutions usually drift towards a median.

But that is not the dead end you think it might be.

Most coding work is repetitive boilerplate, and most typing is just.. well.. typing. Miserable work I too did not really enjoy. What I did enjoy were the end results, and that was just a necessary step to get there.

Now that's less the case than it was before we had LLMs, and for that I too am glad.

___

I think the article headline might've primed you (and me, fwiw) to reading the comment you're replying to as passive. But if you just look at the words of it, that might not actually be the case.

post-it•32 minutes ago

The same can be said of stuff like cloud storage and email and social media. And yet here we are.

burnoutdv•25 minutes ago

Your point is true to some extend, I personally host my own "cloud" storage..it comes with drawbacks, same is true for email..especially email, social media is a society constructs, by definition its reliant on others but many will argue that its not worth keeping anyway (although I wonder how one stays human in this world then, the meat space seems with so many barrieres in this age).

I feel very much like a luddite..or some artisan of a bygone age. The guy above laments how he never enjoyed coding, this is an interesting sentiment, I know quite a few people who enjoy the craft itself, myself included. The ability to form words that have meaning, that create something from nothing. Sure, the words are just a tool, but its something _I_ can master, not some abstract wish machine that may change its functionality tommorow. Obviously one can argue that the computer itself is in this case the one that creates and not me, its not magic that just works with me, but the machine I got obeys me and me alone..another reason why personal computing is important.

21asdffdsa12•26 minutes ago

You lost leverage. Now be great full for the crumbs. If there remain any.

grebc•about 2 hours ago

Viva la revolution!

Serious question - what do you do for fun? I find fishing with friends enjoyable, and using my hands tidying up the old place I bought. It’s not innovating software I’ll never use but I’ll never tire of writing the same old ASP that delivers my clients the results they’re after.

altmanaltman•about 1 hour ago

> I like to think of training and improving AIs as bringing freedom to the world.

Yes, when I think of OpenAI and Anthrophic and Google and Meta and any AI labs and their intentions, i cry a single tear for how these great instituitions are working so hard to bring freedom for humanity.

Walf•about 1 hour ago

Freedom is slavery!

AI owned by a few companies is more likely to put the majority right back to serfdom. You're a privileged fool to believe that freedom is the likely outcome of the current stampede.

With a username that appears to cheer for a sociopath¹, I doubt reason will convince you.

¹ https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sources-sam-alt...

Barbing•38 minutes ago

Their /s was implied

(Like, Meta’s intentions? lol)

flyinglizard•about 1 hour ago

I share the sentiment but the question here is how long can we maintain the balance point where the human in the agentic loop is required. It might be a window lasting only a few years, or for the foreseeable future; I think the answer lies the opaque compute economics of the frontier lab: how well models keep scaling and how economically sustainable is serving those models under the current market conditions.

post-it•31 minutes ago

If my job gets automated, I'll find something else to do. I wouldn't have wanted lamplighters to succeed in preventing electrification, so it would be unfair for me to prevent the automation of my job if it can be done.

anonzzzies•27 minutes ago

I use Astra to drive Fable; I drivel into my phone while walking in the forest and it builds. I don’t need to check; I do as clients need to pay, but it always is great. And it surprises me with things I did not know were possible even (never encountered them before so why would I know). We are at the point where our clients send voice messages and they get what they want without humans basically. This costs 10+10 max2 subs but that’s nothing compared to hiring people. We didn’t fire anyone; we just have 100+ more clients and make almost 50x more money. It’s boring but great as long as it lasts, we are already where you say for what enterprises generally need for the boring parts. That’s 99%.

flyinglizard•19 minutes ago

I find I still add value, but I don't know if my value is real. Am I just biased and expect things to be done a certain way and penalize the model for doing something different? and am I providing the model with enough high quality context to align with my expectations in one-shot?

preommr•about 2 hours ago

These people need to take a vacation and come back in a few months when the vision models get better/cheaper.

Astra is already good at taking screenshots and acting on it (part of the agi claims).