Comment by mvdtnz
20 days ago
> LLMs are, in fact, one of the few products in the past decades that - at least for now - align with this vision. That's because they empower the end users directly.
Oh BULLSHIT. Computer users have been empowered since the very first programming languages were invented. They simply chose not to engage with them.
Who says anything about programming languages? Unless all the bicycle is to you is servicing it?
Even if, the last time what you said was true was somewhere in the 80s, maybe early 90s. Afterwards, "programming" was solidly a domain of professionals, not regular users. I don't know about MacOS, but Windows didn't even ship with anything resembling a programming environment until 2010s.
Also, time and again with technology, the users didn't chose shit. Technology is thrust at them, it's first and foremost a supplier-driven phenomenon. It's the vendors that chose to gradually remove any ability of customization and end-user automation from software and devices. Initially it was under guise of UI/UX - simplify everything, avoid confusion (and making users engage with their brains). Nowadays, the software is as basic, dumb and functionality-free as it can possibly be, so the excuse shifted to security - everything an end-user can do an attacker can do, so let's take away every possible use that isn't authorized by application and OS vendors.
What makes LLMs refreshing is that, for now, they're fully general. The main chat apps don't limit what you can talk about (beyond the usual ass-covering corporate prudishness) - hell, you can use them to work around bullshit limitations regular software has to stop you from harming vendors' profits. But again, only a matter of time - users will get disenfranchised again as near-raw access to LLMs gets replaced by "AI apps".
And what do I mean limitations? Think of Copilot in Microsoft Office. If you used it in the past year, you definitely know its limitations. A monkey could hook up GPT-4 to VBA and get more functional Copilot than what Microsoft gave us. But it's not because they can't make powerful assistant - that's the easy part. The challenge they took is making as weak assistant as possible that does anything useful at all. That's the prevailing attitude in software industry, and it has been for good two decades now.
> Afterwards, "programming" was solidly a domain of professionals, not regular users. I don't know about MacOS, but Windows didn't even ship with anything resembling a programming environment until 2010s.
I'm not sure I agree completely...back in the day on the Mac we had Hypercard, RezEdit, and I do recall various code builder tools that someone could kinda wire up small tools - think things we called "4GLs". On Windows, Visual Basic was a full programming language and tooling, but I distinctly recall lots of non-programmers creating small office scripts and tools. In the late 90s we had things like FrontPage where non-programmers could wire up a simple web page and make it do things they wanted...
Today? Open up Xcode and stare into the abyss of confusion. Apple has made these "Playground" tools - man, that's a big jump for someone who isn't serious about programming to get from there to a full-fledged Swift app ready to deploy. Can generative AI tools bridge this gap for non-programmers? Possibly, but I think we're aligned that these tools aren't likely to replace us anytime soon, because of something you allude to - what's possible today is so much more complex than what we were building in the 80s and 90s, and AI isn't close to being able to replicate all of layers of stuff a professional programer wades through every day.
> I don't know about MacOS, but Windows didn't even ship with anything resembling a programming environment until 2010s.
MacOS only really started doing that with OS X. The classic environment had an undocumented (to normal people) debugger for a console, and likewise HyperCard did exist but I never once saw documentation explaining how to actually use it (perhaps I was looking in all the wrong places?)
I eventually found REALbasic on a magazine cover CD, and paid a lot of pocket money for an educational version of Metrowerks' C compiler that only output 68k-series binaries, neither of which my machines (or OS upgrades) arrived with.
Programming used to be hard, and not everybody is as smart as you are. Things change when difficult things become easy. Engaging with an LLM to have it generate code for you is so far removed from taking a physical book, looking in its index, then hoping it talks about your particular problem, that it's not bullshit.
> Programming used to be hard, and not everybody is as smart as you are.
But some people are willing to learn brutally hard.
Context here is "bicycles for the mind", a metaphor that was talking about people in general - it's not "bicycles for the minds of 0.001% of the population dedicated enough and lucky enough to be able to invest large amount of time to master the arcane arts of writing code, in an antagonistic environment, as software vendors try to prevent them from doing it".
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