Comment by linkregister | Hacker News Reader

Comment by linkregister | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what's wrong with my perspective. I cannot relate to this at all.

I am at a job where I am paid well to build software to do things in a distributed system that processes information across various external systems (some with physical world impacts). The outcome of that computing is revenue for the company. Using agent-wrapped LLMs makes the software authorship component of the job really fast. The rest is virtually the same speed.

For Thomas's mobile computing examples, these are done really well by my phone's operating system's built-in voice command system, mature for a decade by now.

At home, I use software that is well-crafted to do some thing. Or I write a series of scripts to do narrow things that for some reason aren't in Aptitude or Snap, for example "copy all the photos off my iPhone and rename them and sort them by date in my filesystem".

Perhaps I have no imagination, but I don't feel like having an LLM make applications on my phone. I want good software that someone that I trust wrote.

Thomas has been a successful cryptographer, vulnerability analyst, and entrepreneur, so he probably knows what he's doing. I just don't get it.

> At home, I use software that is well-crafted to do some thing. Or I write a series of scripts to do narrow things that for some reason aren't in Aptitude or Snap, for example "copy all the photos off my iPhone and rename them and sort them by date in my filesystem".

> Perhaps I have no imagination, but I don't feel like having an LLM make applications on my phone. I want good software that someone that I trust wrote.

I do not use LLM either, and do not intend to do. I can write my own programs. Even if someone does want to use LLM, it should neither be required nor expected nor the default (and there are also reasons why I think that it should be discouraged to use LLM too much); you should be able to write the scripts and programs by yourself if you want to do it that way (and the computer made to make this possible to do without LLM), even if some people can make LLM to do it at their option, but it should not to require LLM and AI.

I also think that the computer that can start with a programming language such as BASIC or Forth (without first needing menus and GUI to access all of the programs) is useful, and that it is not as good that many modern computers do not do like that.

> you should be able to write the scripts and programs by yourself if you want to do it that way

Having chat gpt one write me a powershell script took a 3 hour manual task using software and made it a 10 minute task which I can repeat any time I fancy should I need to.

Writing something similar would've taken me an hour+ just to dig out the key pieces of information I needed to start in a language I am proficient in. Why would I waste my time?

Let me add my voice to that. It's strange to me that people are now talking about LLM integration in daily-driving their computer as if it would be something desirable. As if being able to "write one's own programs" directly wouldn't be enough; as if the focus shouldn't be on just making that as easy as possible, so that you can just type out what you want instead of expecting a nondeterministic system to infer your meaning. And that's before considering the security risks.

It feels to me rather analogous to being in a foreign country and, rather than learning the local language, you get to hire this translator that works for absurdly cheap, but you have no real idea of the accuracy (because you didn't learn!) and for some reason the translator is only able to speak while physically holding your wallet.

Oddly enough, from what I can tell, AI-powered translation services are not capturing a lot of imagination, while interest in AI-powered (human) language tutoring is booming (at least on the supply side).

> don't know what's wrong with my perspective

Nothing. Thomas, as most ambitious start up founders do according to PG, is living in the future.

  There are already a few places that are living in the future in this respect. Silicon Valley is one of them: an unknown person working on a strange-sounding idea won't automatically be dismissed the way they would back home ...

  The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to switch polarity entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won't work to trying to think of ways it could.

https://www.paulgraham.com/early.html

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