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Comment by zer0tonin | Hacker News Reader

I think the feature is dumb but also the backlash is completely pointless. It literally doesn't get in your way in any manner. It's only extremely hypothetical concerns (read bullshit) about sending random data to openai.

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I have a fairly strong preference for tools that don't contain LLM, but you're right compared to all the other uses of LLM this is pointless.

Edit Because I hit submit too soon: George Nachman is a great guy who delivers a cool tool for free and doesn't deserve the pushback.

you are going to hate most software with that attitude over the next few years

As someone who similarly suffers from AI fatigue, I already do. I can’t wait for the AI hype cycle to follow the blockchain path, I just hope whatever comes afterwards isn’t even worse.

Why should they care about 'most software' if they have tools that work for them?

For example I don't hate iTerm because I don't need to. I can just use a better terminal emulator and get on with my life. People say the same about vscode, why spend the energy hating it instead of just using neovim and forgetting it exists.

That's fine it isn't really designed for me and I'm a software engineer so if I want something bad enough I can try my hand at making it.

Example from earlier today. I wanted to know how to format a date as "06/04/1947", just like that with leading zeros. I can never remember the details of the complex Ruby `strftime` method, so I usually have to spelunk in the docs for the details. Instead I prompted an LLM with "format a Ruby date like '06/04/1947'" and it gave me the correct answer, faster than I could have found the doc page let alone decoded it.

Why the heck not use AI when it's better?

June 4th or April 6th? Don’t use that date format :)

Do don't integrate with legacy systems? That's a nice luxury.

> Why the heck not use AI when it's better?

I think that, in its current iteration, it is not that easy to know.

I haven't tried GPT 4 (which I've heard is much better), but my experiences with 3.5 have been extremely frustrating and underwhelming. I absolutely hate when it starts making stuff up and I have to fix it via the traditional way, it just wasted my time!

I guess this boils down to personal preference, but so far I just prefer a good old Google search.

I was quite happy with copilot auto complete, though. Mostly because of how low friction it was.

I usually hate this expression, but it fits like a glove here:

"Oh, sweet summer child..." :-D

If only you could read the source to confirm for yourself or if the developer had a proven track record instead of being someone who just popped up on the scene for the first time…. Oh wait, you can look at the source and the developer has a proven track record maintaining iTerm2 for over a decade.

Your condescension is embarrassing as it shows you have no idea what you are talking about in this context.

You’re very focused on specifics, which aren’t paramount here. This is not the end of the story, it’s the beginning.

Not to mention iterm development has slowed a lot in recent years. Who knows how much longer the author will be around.

From: https://xeiaso.net/notes/2024/ai-hype/

“A terminal emulator is probably also a fairly bad place to implement this because it's probably one of the most privileged programs on a developer's machine. It deals with all the secrets in the world, and the threat that it could be used to upload them all to a third party is great enough that people are willing to switch away from it sight unseen.”

It’s important to call out poor judgment around development of our FLOSS tools, they are precious.

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