Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

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Here's what I made:

* https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/ - A voice note recorder.

* https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot - My secure AI personal assistant that's made my life admin massively easier.

* https://github.com/skorokithakis/macropad - A macropad.

* https://github.com/skorokithakis/sleight-of-hand - A clock that ticks seconds irregularly but is accurate for minutes.

* https://pine.town - A whimsical little massively multiplayer drawing town.

* https://encyclopedai.stavros.io - A fictional encyclopedia.

* https://justone.stavros.io - A web implementation of the board game Just One.

* https://www.themakery.cc - The website and newsletter for my maker community.

* https://theboard.stavros.io - A feature board that implements itself.

* https://github.com/skorokithakis/dracula - A blood test viewer.

* https://github.com/skorokithakis/support-email-bot - An email bot to answer common support queries for my users.

Maybe some of these will beat the rap.

It does not matter how much stuff is built. What matters is what comes out of it.

And with AI the result of 99.9% is abandonware. Just piles of code no one will ever touch again.

Which proves the point of no productivity gains. Its just cheap dopamine hits.

Missing the point. I no longer need to buy or rely on someone else for software I want to use. A lot of things I want to do ARE one offs. I can write software and throw it away when I'm done.

I know this sounds sarcastic but I really mean it: For years everyone has been monastically extolling some variation of "the best code is deleted code". Now, we have a machine that spits out infinite code that we can infinitely delete. It's a blessing that we can have shitty code generated that exposes at light speed how shitty our ideas are and have always been.

A nicer framing is original ideas and original thinking in general is very hard and doesn't come around very often.

Steve Jobs once said a thing about the belief that an idea is 90% of the work is a disease. He is and was absolutely right.

You still need to spend plenty of time verifying they work though unless it’s something where that truly doesn’t matter.

Abandonware is what the customer wants.

Constant enshittification and UI redesigns are driven by the provider to justify monthly extortion.

The user you're responding too lists a "blood test viewer" [0], which looks to be a tool that turns his blood test PDFs into structured and analyzed data. You're saying that unless he continuously revises/upgrades the code, it's still "abandonware" even if it meets his needs for the near future?

[0] https://github.com/skorokithakis/dracula

Bit rot is real. The dependencies listed here include calling into AI APIs that will stop working with time. So yes if no one keeps this up to date it will rot into useless likely very quickly.

That’s not even mentioning that this tools doesn’t do much beyond wrap a call to Claude. And it’s using Claude to display blood test data to the end user. This is not something I’d trust an LLM to not mess up. You’d really want to double check every single result.

Also humans are not bots.

We hate having to feel like we have to double check everything. We have an asymmetric relationship with gains and losses etc.

Is it me or is this stuff flying over peoples heads?

Just saying, you can paste the sample report into ChatGPT and it does the same thing, and even creates interactive graphs for you. Im not sure how useful something is if a chatbot can do it, with the side benefit of being able to ask for follow up questions.

i guess the custom UI makes you believe you can trust the output, as if there’s any thought going into it rather than just an LLM hallucinating for you

> "A clock that ticks seconds irregularly but is accurate for minutes."

Sounds like something that could be tried as a fix for a kind of OCD (obsessive seconds counting).

Maybe, although it's actually giving me OCD, I think. It's really hard to tune out because of the irregular ticking. I implemented a regular mode to combat this, defeating the purpose somewhat.

what was the motivation for originally making it with irregular ticking?

It sounded fun (and it is)! My favorite mode is one that ticks each second imperceptibly fast, and then stalls for a second in one of the ticks (so that it lasts two).

It's just the right amount of "did that clock just skip a beat? Nah must just be my imagination".

Ha, cool! I love the whimsicality of this

Thanks, I love it too!

Unpredictable things catch our attention - it's the exceptions that are important to survival, and our brains evolved to cope with the stimuli that this experiment messes with.

Something like this would be anxiety inducing for most people, I bet. That'd be an excellent experiment, track heart rate, EEG, and performance on a range of cognitive tasks with 2 minute long breaks between each tasks, one group exposed to the irregular ticking, another exposed to regular ticking, another with silence, and one last one with pleasant white noise.

Sounds like the Chronophage clock in Cambridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Clock. It it's purely mechanical but has odd pauses in the ticks etc

Some of them definitely do not. Like a fictional encyclopedia? What is the point of that? That's like "an alphabetical novel".

And even for the ones that might "beat the rap", I don't understand from your descriptions why they are interesting or unique. A voice note recorder? Cool. There are already hundreds if not thousands of those, why did you need to make your own in the first place? I'm not saying that yours isn't special, I'm just saying that it doesn't help to post the blandest description possible if you're trying to impress people with the utility of your utility.

Sounds like the goalposts are moving from "not useless stuff focused on pretending to improve productivity or projects that make it easier to use AI" to "extremely useful stuff".

Fair. But finally we are seeing what LLM proponents are putting forward.

And it’s exactly what I expected - lines of code. Cute. But… so what? This is not good for the AI hype and nor any continued support for future investment.

On the other hand all this stuff is going to drive continual innovation. The more tokens generated the more model producers invest. And we might eventually get to a place of local models.

I swear, I'm going to stop commenting on this site, the amount of shitting on people who use LLMs (ie everyone) is just impossible to deal with.

I have the opposite experience, the amount of AI boosters deriding the less enthusiastic, gleefully exclaiming how someone will be "left behind" if they don't immediately adopt the latest hype cycle, or sharing AI slop and either embellishing or outright lying about it's capabilities is making me want to log off forever. "Handwritten code? Don't you only care about providing maximum shareholder value?" No.

No-one (apart from some CEOs) cares that you don't use AI, I promise you.

The thing that triggers people is comments like yours still, even at this point, claiming that AI just produces slop and everyone is just lying.

It is absurd, and people are obviously going to react to it.

When did I claim AI just produces slop? When did I claim everyone was lying?

If by "react" you mean make stuff up, sure.

Don't do that, just avoid answering the "non-believers" or whatever they are called. Your comments are insightful for me (and for a lot of other people, I'm sure). You don't need to prove that they are useful, just comment about your experience and ignore them. It's like arguing about religion trying to make the other person to flip their beliefs (a waste of time for everyone involved)

I guess you're right, I really need to get better at ignoring some people. It just really got to me today because someone else looked at one of my projects for two seconds and decided to tell me off for it being "insecure" and "slop", and it kind of ruined my day.

Thanks for the support!

One issue is that I interpreted the parent as OR, not AND. "useless stuff OR productivity tools OR AI tools".

Moreover though, I'm not even saying you shouldn't do those things. I'm actually playing around with AI quite a bit, and certainly have created my share of useless/productivity tools. But it's not a flex to show off your own Flappy Birds or OpenNanoClaw clone, even if they are written in COBOL or MUMPS.

And they definitely do not have to be "extremely useful". But they should answer the question: what problem does it solve?

So not only does he have to show what he built with AI, what he built with AI has to be interesting and unique to you? Why? He's not selling it to you.

Seems like the bar is now it has to be a mass market product. On another post someone else commented a SaaS doesn't count if it doesn't earn sustainable revenue.

I guess OpenClaw also doesn't count because we don't know how much Peter got from OpenAI.

This is an ideological flame war, not a rational discussion. There's no convincing anyone.

I'm actually becoming an AI convert myself. If there is ideology here, it's not about AI, but about keeping trash off the streets.

For example, I checked out their "Fictional Encyclopedia". It's an absolutely terrible project, much worse than useless, because it claims to be an "encyclopedia" right in the name (the tagline is "Everything about everything"), yet it's engineered to just completely make things up, and nowhere on the page does it indicate this! I looked up my own niche open-source project, and was prepared to be at least somewhat impressed that it pulled together facts on the fly into an encyclopedic form. For the first couple of paragraphs that seemed like it might be the case, then it veered into complete fantasy and just kept going.

Like what is the point of this? I can already ask a chatbot the same question and at least then I have explicit indicators that it might be hallucinating. But this page deliberately confuses truth and reality for absolutely zero purpose. It's a waste of brain cells, for both the creator and the consumer, with no redeeming value. It's neither interesting, nor different, nor valuable. AND it's burning tokens to boot!

I mean, come on, the bar is not that high. Some of stavros' projects may even be over it. But the first projects I checked were sub-basement, and I am not interested in searching through mounds of trash for what might be a quarter dollar. I'm actually kind of disappointed that stavros didn't have (or apply) the sense or taste to whittle down that list of 11 (!) projects to some 3 that show off the value of their work. Which I'm starting to understand is everyone's issue with AI brain rot; it seems to just encourage "here's everything, I dunno, you figure it out" which is maddening and deserves the pushback it gets.

> Seems like the bar is now it has to be a mass market product.

The bar for this will just keep moving. Some people are heavily invested in the anti-stance, so human nature being what it is, you've little hope of changing their minds anyway.

no, the bar is accurate and descriptive descriptions. You know how AI words are typically hollow and devoid of meaning? loads of grammatically fine words but not actually saying anything? well, these repos are the github version of that. Lots of words but so starved of meaning I shut off mentally trying to read half of them. Some descriptions are outright lies.

It’s kind of like the beginning sequence from back to the future 1 when it shows all the random inventions at Docs house.

Yeah they are interesting, I guess they do something but are any of them actually delivering value? That’s when you get into the argument of what is value and to whom, but as AIs role in society of generating productivity, that’s pretty disputable if every person being able to build their own train set that turns on the toaster and makes coffee is going to move us forward as a species like , say the internet.

That’s really the only argument, is the use of LLMs worth the trillions of dollars and selling out the future of humanity for. Not is it fun Bildungsroman quirky apps really fast

don't waste your time, they're a slop slinger who won't take any feedback that could feel like a hit to the ego. I've wasted too much time on them already, cut your losses and move on. Their 'safer' personal bot for example is anything but, but they won't listen to feedback.

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