Comment by 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.
> 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
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.
> 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:
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.
> Knowing qrious exists and how to integrate it into a page: expensive.
qrious literally has it integrated already:
https://github.com/davidshimjs/qrcodejs/blob/master/index.ht...
I see many issues. The main one is that none of this is relevant to the qemu discussion. It's on another whole level of project.
I kind of regret asking the poor guy to show his stuff. None of these tutorial projects come even close to what an AI contribution to qemu would look like. It's pointless.
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