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My favorite question to ask these "see how you think" types when it's my turn is:

What is the most impressive thing you've ever done?

Just watch how they struggle with this one. I've never met anyone slinging code tests who is so curious in "how we think" that has ever made anything interesting whether it's code, design, music, a company, anything. It's just a pretentious statement made by gatekeeping noobs who love to interview, nothing more.

I tried to save your comment lol

This is basically what happened, the industry turned manager-heavy and expelled a lot of talent, replacing lifelong developers with bootcamp devs and other non-tech background people. It's kinda messed up because the lifelong developer types got called nerds growing up, had to learn what they know in the face of bullying and computers being very uncool, only to be basically replaced by those who made fun of them when it finally became "cool" and lucrative to be a developer.

Because it's all managers and no talent now, there's like an Interview Industrial Complex that emerged, where most teams spend the majority of time and energy just interviewing thousands of people and hiring/firing (via manufactured drama) while they never really build anything - it's all these managers know how to do because there are so few real developers left.

Some of the best developers I know of (of libs I use, etc.) outright refuse to work in the infantile conditions of the modern corporate setting anyway. The lucky ones have found other revenue streams and spend their coding energy on open source or personal ventures.

I talked to a young founder the other day - maybe 10 years younger than me, in his 20s - who said multiple times he was "retired", he kept waiting for some kind of validation on my face I guess but I just don't find it impressive. I lost respect actually, having heard that. In his mind he thinks he's a baller, in my mind he's a lazy egomaniac who knows 4 total things - I wouldn't even let this kid mow my lawn.

Smart, talented people just aren't valued anymore - it's more about prestige and authority now. But maybe not forever, they're certainly leaving themselves wide open at the advent of this LLM thing. Would love nothing more than the big tech ship to sink and get displaced by smaller, smarter companies.

One of the best looking LLM/RAG apps for desktop I've seen so far.

I agree 100% he should be prosecuted at this point. He should have been the first time.

I can tell by the upvote/downvote dance on the parent comment - people love their celebrities. They get really mad if you talk bad about Elon Musk lol I find it quite pathetic personally.

I of course disagree - I don't see the "huge service". Everything from defrauding investors, customers, speaking out of school (saying he's a physicist in the early days), hanging out with Ghislaine Maxwell, stealing then tanking Tesla, destroying Twitter, he's a walking disaster to the point I believe it's intentional.

> The platform is more open and vibrant than ever

You reveal your lack of experience with Twitter, it's declined a lot.

Pretty sure you can't even link to a tweet (a xweet?) from a news article or blog post - they totally killed the platform, not sure where you've been.

Securities fraud again, funny that the guy who "bought Twitter" and shut down free speech ended up getting sued himself due to his own tweet (lying about # of Teslas being produced).

It's like a bully trying to chase someone but tripping over their shoelace in the first step, love it.

On self-driving: For several years the guy has been saying "next month" "next year" it's been like 10+ years at this point. He's a bigger grifter than the Ashes of Creation guy (8 year long Kickstarter MMO that never launched and still collects payments to this day). Wonder why anyone falls for it, feel bad for the gullible.

Very cool you covered all bases. I'm going through this exact thing in an app, just moved it over from relying on ollama to using node-llama-cpp internally, but maybe I'll copy you and still support ollama too :D

You just made me realize how slow our LLMs are today - we're like in the vintage years!

That's an incredible vision... and not too far away.

You may end up being a great film director in the near AI future thanks to your studies in psychedelia :) I'm most excited to see what people who would otherwise never make a film might come up with

Interesting, microwaving with sound

The moat could have nothing to do with the AI part. Examples:

- e-commerce app is a thin ChatGPT wrapper for the shopping experience but their moat is their products and supply chain details

- video game using LLM NPCs and other dynamic experiences but their moat is something else like incredible graphics or being based on some known IP

- any business based on curation or archival of past LLM responses or interactions, moat could be some quality of that particular data, like other data businesses

Think of all the books that will be watched when we have text-to-film models. Thousands of years of content to be depicted in a number of ways.

It's a very good point - that consciousness may be necessary for certain tasks like recognizing faces, counting, reading, etc. (whatever it may be).

Haha cool :) Thanks for sharing

Amazing work! This looks great.

Question: "no config setup" You mean the user doesn't have to pre-install Ollama or build llama.cpp or anything?

If you don't mind me asking - how are you accomplishing that in an offline desktop app?

You're on a technology message board, there are going to be opinions - you might be the sensitive one.

If you think HN is bad try the others!

At least people would use it.

NoSQL is faster than SQL for access, talking like 10x faster. Which makes sense if you think about what it is.

Very true with maintainability - it's ridiculous to use a NoSQL as your main db eventually because of duplicate data and the very large file storage.

You'd use neither of them with certain math or AI (they use vector dbs optimized for array data) - different tools/jobs.

Same here and I have no idea - seems like it only limits their potential.

> pretty decent

Nice to see you're still patting yourself on the back lol I think you took wayyy too long to release your product and it's overall not an impressive looking social media app, certainly doesn't look like the work of

> 15 engineers

It's like a designer with no portfolio. A lot of them do exist actually, not saying they don't, but I would never hire one.

> I've never seen anyone link to a Bluesky post

Since Twitter/X stopped making some posts public and make it so hard to view profiles you'd think Bluesky would be all over this.

We had a small earthquake not too long ago in SF and I had no Twitter to check - that instant live Internet community is just gone, and it's not just that. Everything used to come out so fast on Twitter, it was a really exciting place to be. It's of course totally ruined now and has been for years, but it was once an awesome thing.

Not sure why Bluesky isn't all over Hollywood and politics, in a presidential election year no less. They're just not doing this very well.

They should have hired more builder types and great designers. IMO they had all the press on their side, riding the decentralization wave, and really were given an excellent opportunity, it's a shame.

Product took forever and when it finally came out it wasn't impressive. They should have staffed up some badass devs & designers who ship or even considered a top tier agency who would have made something truly stunning. Test the market at each step. Decentralization deserved better!

I think a good comparison is OpenAI (including the whole "are they open vs closed" part that Bluesky had to deal with). OpenAI has done an excellent job of: 1) Releasing good products on a good cadence 2) Keeping us waiting in suspense for the next big thing.

Decentralization has a very high excitement potential - I think Bluesky just dropped the ball. Didn't prioritize product.

- Basic internet search (I start ollama CLI faster than I can start a browser - https://ollama.com)

- Formatting/changing text

- Troubleshooting code, esp. new frameworks/libs

- Recipes

- Data entry

- Organizing thoughts: High-level lists, comparison, classification, synonyms, jargon & nomenclature

- Learning esp. by analogy and example

RAG for:

- Website assistants (https://github.com/bennyschmidt/ragdoll-studio/tree/master/e...)

- Game NPCs (https://github.com/bennyschmidt/ragdoll-studio/tree/master/e...)

- Discord/Slack/forum bots (https://github.com/bennyschmidt/ragdoll-studio/tree/master/e...)

- Character-driven storytelling and video game concept art (https://github.com/bennyschmidt/ragdoll-studio/tree/master/r...)

Oh yeah Bluesky lol Took them years to launch a stripped down Twitter clone. Nostr at least had that obscurity thing going for it. Both were like "Ok? Now what?"

People are over Web3 protocols. We have torrents, email, git, and other decentralized technology that was invented to solve specific problems - this idea of inventing a social media protocol is cool, but it comes with all this baggage. It's a for-profit company - wait it's not a for-profit company - it's decentralized - wait it's not decentralized.

This dance never happened with a Napster or a Popcorn Time - it was very clear what the decentralized utility was, and it was really a means to an end of getting to the content. But Bluesky doesn't have any content I want, especially not badly enough to jump through those hoops, or use like a B-version of the real thing. It's like building a new restaurant to compete with the best steakhouse in town but you focus on the trays instead of the food.

Why hasn't Facebook made a browser that runs React/JSX as native code? Should work well for their ad business.

Make a Llama 3 based search as the home page :) And fully support AI/LLMs in the browser :)

Here's my brutally honest take on pair programming: Usually 1 person wants to do it more than the other, and usually that person is being unnecessarily assertive.

The only scenario I think pair programming is socially acceptable to force on developers is a senior type onboarding a new developer out of necessity - might screen share and direct them around some places to show the ropes.

Of course if you love to hang out with someone else while you write code for some reason - more power to you, have fun. For me it's a private thing, even after 20+ years. If anything the LLM is a much more useful sidekick to figure things out.

> Can't talk and code means can't code at all

I disagree with that, I can't even have lyrics in my music really if I'm working on something super hard especially outside my normal wheelhouse. It would at least be disruptive.

The last time "hanging out and coding" was a thing was learning it for the first time - I used to hang out with friends as a kid and we would all try to figure out what Visual Basic was lol and I remember hanging with a friend learning JavaScript during the early web days, drinking coffee through the night, good times.

These days it would feel forced and can't imagine why anyone would regularly pair program, especially now with LLMs.

> People lie

Obviously taken into account - I still have no problem whatsoever identifying great developers on GitHub and I'm sure many other developers who actually code often could too. You have bigger problems if you can't tell if someone is lying or not about their abilities when all their work is visible to you. You should be able to easily tell what is theirs vs not.

> Lol, great method!

Yes people inflate their own egos and abilities - especially those who spend all their time interviewing others instead of building.

I prefer demonstrable experience for an engineer over standardized tests which tell you nothing about any real world experience: App architecture, async programming, APIs, UI, DOM, git, unit/e2e tests, any known framework or library, etc. A person who knows all those but hasn't memorized CTCI is a lot more useful than the CTCI memorizer with no evidence of work ever performed.

Awesome thanks. Given it's an iPad I'm guessing that means consumer-facing AI which is very cool.