Comment by poisonborz
4 days ago
What I like is how most such vibed tools - self-aware how ubiquitous they are - don't try to capture audience or offer paid services. Everything is suddenly available without logins, share via a simple url, self-hosting is expected. While AI diminishes the power, influence and recognition of creators, I find it overall a great democratizing force in software.
It also means you shouldn't bet on the tool to still be available next month.
i can bet on it if i can host it in my computer
And then you're also the maintainer of the software in charge of keeping it up-to-date with its dependencies etc.
29 replies →
Yeah, but then toolchain security is yours to handle.
2 replies →
Bottom of the homepage has a link to the GitHub project: https://github.com/aboard-io/tinylittleoffice
The bottom of the README has instructions to run locally and self-host.
Looks good to me.
> > > a great democratizing force
> > a great democratizing force
> a great democratizing force
Where have I heard this before? This will surely end well.
> democratizing force
That word is so misused in this context, it is now bereft of meaning. “Democratisation” does not mean that a person without a skill can now achieve a result. A local pastry shop which makes cakes to order does not “democratise” baking. LLMs do not “democratise” software, anyone with access to a computer could already build and host any of these tools.
“Democratisation” is the word shady actors want to put in our heads to make us not think of the bad parts. Like how countries with “democratic” and “people's republic” in the name are the least democratic. If you have to keep repeating how democratising you are, you aren’t at all.
Technically anyone could write a full book or transcribe them before the printing press came around, but it certainly was a democratizing force for publishing when it was invented. The democratization is in the scale and leverage available to the average person.
> Technically anyone could write a full book or transcribe them before the printing press came around
No, no they could not. Access to books was very limited then and not that many could read and write. That comparison does not work in the slightest.
4 replies →
Language evolves. What is certainly true is that the scribal class of people who could program has had its gates of entry almost deleted, and people, without sacrificing a meaningful part of their available time, can build tools to solve their problems.
To me, this is democratization.
Sure anyone could have, but that's always a scale.
> Language evolves.
Of course. My objection is that the word democratisation was specifically chosen to manipulate us. That’s what bad actors do, they pick positive words to describe bad things so it’s hard to argue against them.
It’s fascinating how a community who can clearly see through “think of the children” as the ruse that it is¹ just gobbles up “democratisation” until they choke. Tech people love to believe they’re immune to manipulation, when doing so is the easiest trick in the book. All you have to do is make the problem interesting enough and the critical part of the brain shuts off.
¹ Because of course we should protect children, that’s positive. The issue becomes when bad actors use that as an excuse to promote actions which do not have protecting children as their true intent.
"Democratisation doesn't mean this, and it doesn't mean that...." but you never outline what it does mean, to you. It's a perfect foil to attack others while claiming moral superiority.
Also, I don't recognize your authority to gatekeep word definitions. Here in my little hovel, words mean whatever the general mass of readers think they do.
Historically wrong. https://www.etymonline.com/word/democratize
> We teach the population at the cheapest possible rate; and the aim all the democratization (if we may use the word) of literature proposes to itself in this country, is to store the minds of the many, of the anonymous multitude, with a large portion of valuable, because practically useful, facts. [Meliora, vol. ii, no. 6, 1860]
I’m not sure you understand that quote, or how it (doesn’t) relate to the point.
For one, it even has a parenthetical saying “if we may use the word” meaning the word isn’t being used in it’s proper sense, that’s the whole point of that expression. For another, the quote itself is referring to teaching, as in imparting a skill, and a central point of my comment is that having a skill and having a result done for you are not the same thing. Finally, if you have to go back two centuries to find an example… The countries that I mentioned didn’t even have those names yet, it is clear (if you engage in good faith) that the point regards the modern world and is not a criticism of societies since the dawn of men.
4 replies →
I think that there is something deeper about the disdain for AI than it's raw capitalist consequences. Perhaps it's that we are losing the quintessentially human act of creation to robots.
Is software a utility or an artistic outlet?
Was the art the act of typing out code? Everything else, the reasoning, remains in any depth you want. Since the same reasoning produces the sameish code I argue this is not the same as who holds the brush on the canvas.
I mean, for now it hasn't. Who knows? If it ever gets a serious user base, might easily sell ads or whatever else.
Also, it still costs money to host it, the creator won't eat the cost if it gets up to a serious amount of usage
>If it ever gets a serious user base, might easily sell ads or whatever else.
It would need to offer some pretty valuable features, otherwise I'd just vibecode the same app but without ads lol. What's funny is that I have already vibecoded a similar app for my own usage. It's a bit more complex (integrates with a backend I own), but this is something even a free LLM could easily generate.
>Also, it still costs money to host it, the creator won't eat the cost if it gets up to a serious amount of usage
This is a static app. It's free to host in a number of places. Odds are this is just a GitHub Page. I'd be willing to be the creator's only bill is the domain name.
You would but not everyone would. Some people find it easier to just use what exists already
It's because the creators can't vouch for the work at all and it probably has whack issues. It could be a literal crime to charge for this kind of stuff.
Literal crime seems a bit exaggerated, no? It seems more like the epitome of “move fast, break things”. Folks are moving so fast now that they don’t even bother to try to recoup value for the effort they may have invested anymore.
If that’s a crime, there are a lot of companies that made a lot of money breaking that law.
Your take is worth responding to. See my reply to the similar question. The gist is, move fast and violating patent law is not the same as breaking things. Also it can be illegal to sell products that are broken when there are claims of them... Not being broken. Depends on the situation.
5 replies →
Unfortunately "literal" has come to mean "metaphorical" and descriptivists bully everyone into accepting this (ironically its own form of prescriptivism).
2 replies →
I feel like some people confront their internal dissonance on AI by constructing a fantasy past that never, ever existed.
Zero programmers have ever "vouched" for their work. Everything has bugs and faults and rough edges. Everyone is building stuff that in the end is overwhelmingly code that they didn't write and have never looked at (I mean...do you think that Python script you wrote is "your" code? 99.999% of the runtime is in code you have never looked at).
The "literal crime" just puts the hysterics of this to the next level.
People don't charge for this stuff because in the supply/demand equation, there is basically infinite supply to create fun little things in just a few prompts. Infinite supply means that the ability to charge disappears. This isn't super hard to understand.
And FWIW, infinite supply applies to more and more of the market. I mean, I'm sure people have seen the guy who cloned Photoshop via vibe coding. Again the dissonance there is amazing where people need to believe it's terrible, but as someone who used Photoshop for decades...it's astonishingly good given everything, and iterating rapidly. Similarly, charging to build websites and the like...well, a lot of the market has seen the pricing floor disappear.
[flagged]
5 replies →
> It could be a literal crime to charge for this kind of stuff.
How so?
It's a rip off of an office suite, the code for said office suite may or may not have came from derivatives of unpermissive licenses, or from patented work(msft has a portfolio of patents for their office products), depending on what the prompts/developer thinks it does and what it actually does could be false advertising or fraud, the list goes on and on. Also gdpr, pcidss. It's a lot safer to make things free when they can't be vouched for and someone's actual ass or reputation is on the line.
2 replies →