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Comment by 5o1ecist

1 day ago

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/hey-hey-someone-on-hackerne...

Tested with python 3.10.6, Windows. It's the only version I have installed, for which I've also have installed tkinter.

Welcome to 2026. You're late.

14 comments

5o1ecist

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mmh0000  19 hours ago

lol calling Python lightweight:

  ⟩ dnf install --downloadonly --installroot /tmp/yourmom python3
  …SNIP…
  Transaction Summary:
  Installing:        59 packages

  Total size of inbound packages is 33 MiB. Need to download 33 MiB.
  After this operation, 118 MiB extra will be used (install 118 MiB, remove 0 B).
  The operation will only download packages for the transaction.

Don't get me wrong, Python is a great many things. Easy to use, surprisingly fast for a scripting language, and well documented. But not lightweight.

(( The Windows version is 110MiB after decompression. ))

soupfordummies  1 day ago

while this is cool and I want to play with it myself, it's still sort of discounting the overhead here of installing python, installing tkinter, adding shortcuts to the program within Windows, etc.

Of course the barrier to creating bespoke tools is lower but it's also still a decent bit of overhead and not just "hey AI, create me a Notepad clone that works like it used to". Arguably it's still more intensive than googling "notepad clone" and just downloading n++.

  • 5o1ecist  1 day ago

    > discounting the overhead

    Are you moving the goalpost?

    The whole thing is a bit unfair anyway. My perplexity is trained on me. It knows that I have python installed, thus it wouldn't tell me that I would need to do so. It knows I'm a programmer, it knows that I value accuracy and precision. It knows to double-check everything all by itself.

    I am confident in claiming that it can get the task done regardless of the above, but its response, as is, cannot be generalized.

    • soupfordummies  19 hours ago

      Yeah that’s fair.

      It’s also sort of a given that anyone on this site is pretty well versed with technical stuff so maybe results would vary with Tina over in HR, for instance.

      I think that sort of “last mile” problem is what agents like claw etc are supposed to help with.

      Also, any reason you prefer Perplexity? Haven’t really used that one before TBH

      2 replies →

    • javascriptfan69  1 day ago

      >Are you moving the goalpost?

      I mean you did originally claim that this was something that was "for the masses" and then posted a solution that only someone technical could actually use.

      Not that I doubt it couldn't one shot something this simple with a .exe wrapper.

      1 reply →

pqtyw  1 day ago

> Welcome to 2026

But anyone with basic experience in Python could have written that same app in minutes 20 years ago?

  • 5o1ecist  21 hours ago

    I fail to see your point. That's not what this is about.

    I wrote "Welcome to 2026", because the user, apparently, did not yet know that it only takes a few sentences for having it create a simple notepad clone.

    If I had asked pqtyw to write me a barebones notepad clone, 20 years ago, would pqtyw have done that? For free? Within a single minute?

    No!