I can know literally nothing about a programming language, ask a LLM to make me functions and a small program to do something, then read documentation and start building off of the base immediately, accelerating my learning allowing me to find new passions for new languages and new perspectives for systems. Whatever's going on in the AI world, assisting with learning curves and learning disabilities is something it's proving strong in. It's given me a way forward with trying new tech. If it can do that for me, it can do that for others.
Diminishing returns for investors maybe, but not for humans like me.
If you "know literally nothing about a programming language", there are two key consequences: 1) You cannot determine if the code is idiomatic to that language, and 2) You may miss subtle deficiencies that could cause problems at scale.
I’ve used LLMs for initial language conversion between languages I’m familiar with. It saved me a lot of time, but I still had to invest effort to get things right.
I will never claim that LLMs aren’t useful, nor will I deny that they’re going to disrupt many industries...this much is obvious.
However, it’s equally clear that much of the drama surrounding LLMs stems from the gap between the grand promises (AGI, ASI) and the likely limits of what these models can actually deliver.
The challenge for OpenAI is this: If the path ahead isn’t as long as they initially thought, they’ll need to develop application-focused business lines to cover the costs of training and inference. That's a people business, rather than a data+GPU business.
I once worked for an employer that used multi-linear regression to predict they’d be making $5 trillion in revenue by 2020. Their "scaling law" didn’t disappoint for more than a decade; but then it stopped working. That’s the thing with best-fit models and their projections: they work until they don’t, because the physical world is not a math equation.
It still requires effort, but it decreases so much of those early hurdles, which I often face, and demotivate me. E.g. I have constant "why" questions, which I can keep asking LLM forever with it having infinite patience. But these are very difficult to find Googling.
Hmm. I got ChatGPT-4o to write some code for me today. The results, while very impressive looking, simply didn't work. By the time I'd finished debugging it, I probably spent 80% of the time I would have spent writing it from scratch.
None of which is to discount the furture potential of LLMs, or the amazing ability they have right now - I've solved other simpler problems almost entirely with LLMs. But they are not a panacea.
Something interesting I observed after introducing LLMs to my team is that the most experienced team members reached out to me spontaneously to say it boosted their productivity (although when I asked other team members, every single one was using LLMS).
My current feeling is that LLMs great with dealing with known unknowns. You know what you want, but don’t know how to do it, or it’s too tedious to do yourself.
> I probably spent 80% of the time I would have spent writing it from scratch.
A 20% time improvement sounds like a big win to me. That time can now be spent learning/improving skills.
Obviously learning when to use a specific tool to solve a problem is important... just like you wouldn't use a hammer to clean your windows, using a LLM for problems you know have never really been tackled before will often yield subpar/non-functional results. But even in these cases the answers can be a source of inspiration for me, even if I end up having to solve the problem "manually".
One question I've been thinking about lately is how will this work for people who always had this LLM "crutch" to solve problems when they've started learning how to solve problems? Will they skip a lot of the steps that currently help me know when to use a LLM and when it's rather pointless currently.
And I've started thinking of LLMs for coding as a form of abstraction, just like we have had the "crutch" of high-level programming languages for years, many people never learned or even needed to learn any low-level programming and still became proficient developers.
Obviously it isn't a perfect form of abstraction and they can have major issues with hallucinations, so the parallel isn't great... I'm still wondering how these models will integrate with the ways humans learn.
The thing that limits my use of these tools is that it massively disrupts my mental flow to shift from coding to prompting and debugging the generated code.
For self-contained tasks that aren't that complex they can save a lot of time but for features that require careful integration into a complex architecture I find them more than useless in their current state.
I've been using ChatGPT (paid) and Perplexity (unpaid) to help with different coding stuff. I've found it very helpful in some situations. There are some instructions I give it almost every time - "don't use Kotlin non-null assertions". Sometimes the code doesn't work. I have some idea of its strengths and limitations and have definitely found them useful. I understand there are other AI programming tools out there too.
Diminishing returns means is not getting better. Its not saying anything about the current state. So that's great that its current capabilities meet your needs, but if you had a different use-case where it didn't quite work that well and were just waiting till the next version, your wait will be longer than you think based on past progress.
It seems like it would still be too early to tell. Especially since the modern level LLMs have been for here for such a short period of time. And this person tried to predict the wall before GPT-4 which was a massive leap seemingly out of nowhere.
We've been learning new languages by tinkering on examples and following leads for decades longer than many people on this website have been alive.
Learning new programming languages wasn't a hurdle or mystery for anyone experienced in programmong previously, and learning programming (well) in the first place ultimately needs a real mentor to intervene sooner than later anway.
AI can replace following rote tutorials and engaging with real people on SO/forums/IRC, and deceive one into thinking they don't need a mentor, but all those alternatives are already there, already easily available, and provide very significant benefits for actual quality of learning.
Learning to code or to code in new languages with the help of AI is a thing now. But it's no revolution yet, and the diminishing returns problem suggests it probably won't become one.
I find that its capability is massively dependent on the availability of training data. It really struggles to write syntactically correct nushell but it appears to be an emacs-lisp wizard. So even if we're up against so some kind of ceiling, there's a lot of growth opportunity in getting it to to be uniformly optimal, rather than capable only in certain areas.
> Diminishing returns for investors maybe, but not for humans like me.
The diminishing returns for humans like you are in the training cost vs. the value you get out of it compared to simply reading a blog post or code sample (which is basically what the LLM is doing) and implementing yourself.
Sure, you might be happy at the current price point, but the current price point is lighting investor money on fire. How much are you willing to pay?
Been using Manjaro XFCE for a minute, KDE is great if you're rocking ~32GB of RAM but for lightweight, MX Linux (Debian), Lubuntu (LXDE) Lightweight Ubuntu. Most distros come with drivers that trackpads and wireless just ..work. So many flavors but with KDE you can customize everything with rightclicking, no config edits. It's fun, but lower end machines I'd suggest XFCE, KDE will use 2GB of RAM just idling on desktop.
I ditched Windows completely back in 2017-2018 and haven't looked back. I'm no star-programmer or star sys-admin or anything but the love of tinkering with things, VMs, networking, sockets, SSH, SCP, rsync, having direct access to my kernel (like sysctl stuff), managing my ssh keys in ~/.ssh/, using a drop-down Quake style terminal (Tilda) has been a dream.
Why would somebody want to sign on with a 'cloud account' for their desktop login, have forced stuff like Teams, Edge (Are you SURE YOU WANT TO SWITCH TO CHROME/FIREFOX? notifications), OneDrive, and have things like Recall pushed on them.
Linux isn't rocket science any more there's Add/Remove programs on every distro and people can browse from there, there's software pulled straight from github for compiling/installing as well as the 'app store' for exploring.
It's been my tinkerer's heaven. Most you need is a trustable VPN with a killswitch that runs Wireguard and your linux install is going to be great.
Gaming wise, well gaming needs to get their heads out of their asses and dev for Linux and respect that just because there's not yet manjority market share doesn't mean there won't be.
Disposable OS now adays is just boot a live CD (USB) that loads everything in to RAM with NVidia drivers already loaded.
Try a bunch of linux distros .isos in oracle VMs or any VM managers, use Ventoy to put the ISOs on a flash drive, my 128GB stick lets me have dozens of them, and boot any distro you want you can have as many ISOs that will fit, they'll all boot when you select which one you want.
As much as I dislike KDE, this is just not true. Perhaps you mean your whole system idles at 2GB including all other running services?
To anyone new to Linux, I recommend sticking to Wayland. Gnome if you're familiar with MacOS, KDE if coming from Windows. Use a popular distro with good documentation online (Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch).
Don't worry too much about memory. Just about anything will be lighter than windows. I've had friends choose the absolute worst X11 desktops because it's "light" then run into all sorts of multi monitor issues
I'm talking utilizing it with the desktop widgets, tools, customizations cool taskbar widgets (I'd add the openAI app), different system informations/rss feeds embedded across multiple monitors.. the stuff KDE is awesome for.
KDE is amazing. I love it. My little laptop though I get by with just XFCE on an i3 8GB RAM, 250GB NVMe SSD.
Agreed on everything else you said. People switching from Mac's ultra-HD for fonts get the 'ick' switching to Linux desktop too. We'll get there.
I replied to an above comment, not when utilizing KDE's widgets and other desktop integrations like RSS feeds, weather, embedded system/server informations, etc. KDE is amazing, but I like to utilize the widgets, and full functionality of things with it. With my i3, 8GB RAM I opted for Manjaro XFCE.
I absolutely suggest using KDE for people switching over. Full desktop experience.
When not using anything my systems would idle at around 800MB-1GB running default install Manjaro. Firefox after awhile and I was using the full 8GB and tabs were crashing.
Actually, a lot of people use Lemmy, and there's pretty decent content on it in the communities. I post Linux stuff mostly and my threads get a lot of comments. Or I'll ask questions like "What are everybody's cool not so well known websites" and get a ton of feedback. Accounts are accessible via Mastodon as well, it isn't ideal, but, it's some kind of start.
So, lots of people use it, actually. I haven't noticed any bots replying to each other like what Reddit is now adays reposting content and reposting top comments.
Due to HIPAA how many hospitals and patients got screwed because of this and we don't hear about it? No QA/QC and push straight to production? All to check a check-list for 'compliance' how about 'Software passed QA by X Y Z engineers and here are their notes:' transparency if they're running on ....the world's computers.
Makes too much sense to do that.
Where's the class action law suit for all the people who missed their flights, meetings, family? I've seen stories of people's families last moments being missed as an emergency flight was booked and they got trapped at an airport. How many people were stranded in weird places they weren't familiar with and couldn't afford a hotel and weren't accommodated, or were but ended up being stuck in a place with the absolute need to be on the next flight out?
Agree that Crowdstrike does not care, but just went through every single item on that Devops checklist and it's missing what would have prevented this issue. :-)
Just a quick look at 2024's CVEs, 0days for Windows is a security nightmare. Not singling out Windows specifically, but they have a lot.
Browsers only just recently patched browsers being able to be served javascript that scans local devices on 10.* and 192.168.* etc hitting IoT devices with exploits and payloads, hell even hitting open listening sockets on localhost and 0.0.0.0 -- that's cross platform, how many years did that go under the radar?
And now Windows is getting 'Recall' which will monitor and scan your every PC action to remember it for you using ML; I don't see that going back at all /s
>Browsers only just recently patched browsers being able to be served javascript that scans local devices on 10.* and 192.168.* etc hitting IoT devices with exploits and payloads, hell even hitting open listening sockets on localhost and 0.0.0.0 -- that's cross platform, how many years did that go under the radar?
Ironically windows was not hit by that, but the "secure"(?) operating systems of mac and linux were.
In the future, everything will block you unless you're on a residential IP address in a Western country, running Chrome on the latest version of Windows or iOS, you have remote attestation, and your ISP's ASN isn't haunted because someone in your neighborhood had downloaded malware a few years ago
Between Wordpress's bullshit and capitalist bullshit like Google doing things like this, I'm honestly just in utter shock at what the internet actually _is_ now adays.
Folks, Google just saved Mozilla. For nearly two decades, Google dumped limitless resources into Chrome and gave it all away to gain maximal adoption. That would be considered anti-competitive behavior in any other context. By acting more competitively, Google is giving the competition an opportunity to finally compete. Firefox was so close to hitting that red line in terms of market share. Now Firefox is going to not only survive, but thrive, and so will other newer browsers like Brave and Ladybird too.
How exactly do you think Mozilla is going to get funding to continue Firefox development with Google now unable to pay them billions to keep Google Search the #1 default?
This Google breakup is only going to destroy Mozilla entirely. Brave will survive as long as it can piggyback on Chrome development, and by getting bribed/paid by advertisers to have their ads shown instead of blocked. Ladybird can survive because it's all-volunteer, but it's not even close to being a viable browser for regular use, and with the limited development resources it has, it's questionable it will ever be really usable for general users.
The real winners of this "antitrust" action will be Microsoft (who can then dedicate more resources to Edge and make that the new IE6.0) and Apple. There will only be two browsers you can use in the future: Edge (Windows-only) and Safari (Mac/iOS-only). Other browsers will wither and die since you won't be able to use them for your internet banking and various other tasks. You'll just get a message like we did back in 2002, saying "this browser not supported, please install Microsoft Edge or Apple Safari to continue".
Have they even tried getting funding via national digital sovereignty efforts?
The justification seems easy - "fund us so your citizens don't need to depend on foreign ad companies and US-based tracking to access local and national services."
Make sure any parts which are dependent on Mozilla infrastructure can be re-hosted by other providers.
Have releases which are fully free software, with reproducible builds, which can be audited to ensure privacy protections.
And commit to legal agreements to preserve those protections.
The countries in turn can require that services in those countries must support Firefox, or perhaps specifically ESR versions of Firefox.
That sounds great in theory, but I'm extremely skeptical of it working in reality. Do we have any good examples of governments backing significant open-source projects like this, and even worse, in a manner collaborating with other governments? Basically you're asking for the EU to become the main funding source of Mozilla, because it's hard to envision anyone else joining this effort.
>That I don't know of more is besides the point, which is have they tried?
They haven't lost their funding from Google yet, and the case ruling was only what? a week ago? Did you expect them to see into the future and predict this turn of events or something? I imagine they're very busy talking about this stuff right now, but 6 months ago they probably weren't too worried about suddenly losing their Google funding because of government action.
> The countries in turn can require that services in those countries must support Firefox, or perhaps specifically ESR versions of Firefox.
The countries can also trade that support for features that might not be in the best interest of its users, such as introducing closed blobs to the code, "benign" trackers that allow government oversight of surfing, breakage when using VPNs, etc.
People could fork those browsers if the code is still open, but look at how many people use Floorp, or Vivaldi.
I feel it's akin to government support of journalism.
Those are good points. If FF can diversify the sovereign funds its tied to then it can cancel out some of the problems.
I knew where you were coming from re: fully free software. My concern was more how its sovereign donors could influence that.
I didn't know about Naenara. Checking it out.
And yeah I agree about gov't support for journalism, but in the case of NPR (I work for one of their member stations), when large entities like X decide to label them "Government Sponsored" or whatever it indicates that there are some who see a conflict of interest. That could carry over to browsers.
NPR is government funded in that lots of different governments, including university radio stations, decided to buy their news feed instead of (or in addition to) CBC and/or BBC.
If that's a conflict of issue, then having a paltry 40 sovereign funds would also be an issue.
It's also blowing smoke, as a single man, Murdoch, owns hundreds of local, national, and international publishing outlets, but the single owner of an entity which is too small to be considered a DMA gateway doesn't care about the details.
Adtech is cyber warfare. Used to manipulate, control, and feed our minds with things that not even we understand what they're up to. There is no argument for uBlock being disabled/removed.
“it’s the Google ball on the taskbar and when you click it, the internet comes up” — is the argument to use Chrome that many people will go with.
I’m not making fun of tech illiterate people either. We are all more vulnerable in some parts of our lives than others. Maybe a giant internet tech company won’t abuse you like it abuses people who don’t know much about computers, but big chemical industry may abuse you and kill you early through environmental pollution.
We must recognise that there are many people vulnerable to different kinds of abuse through destructive business practices in pursuit of growth (“rot capitalism”). And if we don’t have a culture of protecting the most vulnerable, someone won’t protect you in areas of your vulnerability.
>“it’s the Google ball on the taskbar and when you click it, the internet comes up” — is the argument to use Chrome that many people will go with.
>I’m not making fun of tech illiterate people either.
The problem here is that when Joe Sixpack buys a Windows PC and starts it up, there is no "Google ball" on the taskbar: there's an icon for Edge, Microsoft's own browser that's included in Windows. Chrome is nowhere to be found. Joe only sees Chrome when he goes to a Google site like YouTube and gets prompted to install it, and goes through the steps of doing so. Joe could just as easily install Firefox, but he doesn't, perhaps because no huge website like YouTube is encouraging him to.
And also, the majority of people in tech still use chrome out of convenience, because they don't give enough of a shit about Google being an evil monopoly.
How can we the expect Joe to "do the right thing" when his tech-friend uses Chrome too?
"but that one website I need to use once a month doesn't work in Firefox" - fine, from a techie it seems too much to ask to just use a different browser once a month.
All these things are likely. It is also often the case that Joe's friend who's "good with computers" will install Chrome for him. Chrome is massively popular and overall a very functional browser.
As another commenter mentioned, too, Edge is Chromium-derived. The manifest v2 will soon (2025) be deprecated in Chromium, which is not that different from the Chrome deprecation. In Chrome, v2 is still technically supported until further notice, even in the newest Canary builds. It's just that plugins using v2 will require manual installation. All in all, it looks to me like 2025 is when v2 will be properly dropped on Chrome and Chromium.
I quite like Chrome. Still if ads pop up all over it's off to Firefox I guess.
I see the desktop usage percentages are 65% chrome, 6.5% firefox so I guess others do too. I think it's mostly a lack of hassle thing. Chrome usually just works and lets you read your website without moving the interface around or crashing etc.
Diminishing returns for investors maybe, but not for humans like me.