Comment by alganet

8 months ago

Your QR generator is actually a project written by humans repackaged:

https://github.com/neocotic/qrious

All the hard work was made by humans.

I can do `npm install` without having to pay for AI, thanks.

10 comments

alganet

ben_w 8 months ago

I am reminded of a meme about musicians. Not well enough to find it, but it was something like this:

  Real musicians don’t mix loops they bought.
  Real musicians make their own synth patches.
  Real musicians build their own instruments.
  Real musicians hand-forge every metal component in their instruments.
  …
  They say real musicians raise goats for the leather for the drum-skins, but I wouldn't know because I haven’t made any music in months and the goats smell funny.

There's two points here:

1) even though most of people on here know what npm is, many of us are not web developers and don't really know how to turn a random package into a useful webapp.

2) The AI is faster than googling a finished product that already exists, not just as an NPM package, but as a complete website.

Especially because search results require you to go through all the popups everyone stuffs everywhere because cookies, ads, before you even find out if it was actually a scam where the website you went to first doesn't actually do the right thing (or perhaps *anything*) anyway.

It is also, for many of us, the same price: free.

latexr 8 months ago

> I am reminded of a meme about musicians. Not well enough to find it
You only need to search for “loops goat skin”. You’re butchering the quote and its meaning quite a bit. The widely circulated version is:
> I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.
It’s not about “real musicians”¹ but a personal reflection on dependencies and abstractions and the nature of creative work and remixing. Your interpretation of it is backwards.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
alganet 8 months ago
Ice Ice Baby getting the bass riff of Under Pressure is sampling. Making a cover is covering. Milli Vanilli is another completely different situation.
I am sorry, none of your points are made. Makes no sense.
The LLM work sounds dumb, and the suggestion that it made "a qr code generator" is disingenuous. The LLM barely did a frontend for it. Barely.
Regarding the "free" price, read the comment I replied on again:
> Built with Aider and either Sonnet 3.5 or Gemini 2.5 Pro
Paid tools.
It sounds like the author payed for `npm install`, and thinks he's on top of things and being smart.
- ben_w 8 months ago
  
  > The LLM work sounds dumb, and the suggestion that it made "a qr code generator" is disingenuous. The LLM barely did a frontend for it. Barely.
  Yes, and?
  The goal wasn't "write me a QR library" it was "here's my pain point, solve it".
  > It sounds like the author payed for `npm install`, and thinks he's on top of things and being smart.
  I can put this another way if you prefer:
  Running `npm install qrious`: trivial. Knowing qrious exists and how to integrate it into a page: expensive.
  https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/
  > > Built with Aider and either Sonnet 3.5 or Gemini 2.5 Pro
  > Paid tools.
  I get Sonnet 4 for free at https://claude.ai — I know version numbers are weird in this domain, but I kinda expect that means Sonnet 3.5 was free at some point? Was it not? I mean, 3.7 is also a smaller version number but listed as "pro", so IDK…
  Also I get Gemini 2.5 Pro for free at https://aistudio.google.com
  Just out of curiosity, I've just tried using Gemini 2.5 Pro (for free) myself to try this. The result points to a CDN of qrcodejs, which I assume is this, but don't know my JS libraries so can't confirm this isn't just two different ones with the same name: https://github.com/davidshimjs/qrcodejs
  My biggest issue with this kind of thing in coding is the same as my problem with libraries in general: you're responsible for the result even if you don't read what the library (/AI) is doing. So, I expect some future equivalent of the npm left-pad incident — memetic monoculture, lots of things fail at the same time.
  
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