9 ms·

Seriously confused, the article first screws up royally saying its not opensource, which they correct, but then discuss "shoved down their throats" ... a featur

• verandaguy 2y ago
  You're right across the board. My only issue with it is general-purpose AI fatigue. Everywhere I look, blog posts use the same generic-looking AI art (I can't quite put it into words, but you probably know the look I'm talking about), social media posts are written up using genAI (e.g. Linkedin will now ask you if you want AI to write your post for you -- though let's be honest, original thoughts are few and far between on there to begin with), and while interviewing recently I received multiple warnings about disabling any AI assistants in my editor (to me, it's kind of a bummer that that's a big enough issue to mention at all). I have, in principle, nothing against an opt-in feature that requires unmistakable user consent and a specific sequence of actions to enable. I'm just kinda tired of AI in general, and I'm also worried about potential licensing issues that may arise if you use genAI in your terminal to write scripts that weren't permissively licensed before being used as part of a training set. That's nothing new though, I had, and have, the same concerns with Github Copilot. I also recognize that my complaint is pretty personal (not counting the licensing thing). My low-level annoyance with genAI isn't something the AI industry at large should seek to resolve. Maybe I'm more set in my ways than I should be at this point in my life. Either way, it's a factor for me and a few other tech people I know.
  • SoftTalker 2y ago
    > while interviewing recently I received multiple warnings about disabling any AI assistants in my editor Weird. Does the company forbid its staff to use AI assistants? I get that they want to find out what you know. If you know how to solve problems using an AI, isn't that what they are going to (increasingly) expect you to do on the job? In fact, demonstrating that you can effectively use AI to develop, would seem to me to be something they'd want to see.
    • mattgreenrocks 2y ago
      > If you know how to solve problems using an AI, isn't that what they are going to (increasingly) expect you to do on the job? Why would you work somewhere that prescribed your workflow? You're a professional. Do your job as you see fit, whether that involves AI assistance or not. > demonstrating that you can effectively use AI to develop, would seem to me to be something they'd want to see. Irrelevant. They want you to meet business needs more than play with today's shiny technology.
    • verandaguy 2y ago
      The stated reason was that they wanted to understand my ability to solve a problem and my thought process when faced with their problem. Having run technical interviews in the past, I completely agree with the reasoning. While I don't use it, I'll grant you that AI is good at solving small, repetitive, tedious problems; stuff that's maybe a bit too domain-specific to be widely available in a library, but that's consistently subtly different enough that you have to sink time into either making different implementations or trying to generalize. AI is generally going to be poor at solving novel problems, and while that's something that you can never really use in an interview for a variety of reasons, I can send you a problem that's likely new to you and see how you tackle it. I'll also admit that there's not a single good way to do that as it is. Technical interviewing is more of an art than a science, and it's difficult to get really good signal from an interview, generally speaking.
      • williamcotton 2y ago
        If you're experienced with how to use an LLM they can be very good at helping with novel problems and much more than boilerplate. I've been able to tackle problems that would have otherwise taken up too much time and effort between my jobs as both expert witness for software related Federal lawsuits and as a father of two young children. Here's just a sampling of what I've accomplished since I started using these tools: A convolutional neural network trained using PyTorch to predict the next chord (as tablature) on a guitar based on image data. Includes labeling software for the image data as well as an iOS app for hosting and running the model. A web framework written in C using clang blocks for the DSL, per request memory arena, and complete JSON-API compatible ORM, JWT auth, and enough sanitizers and leak detect to make your head spin. A custom CLI DSL modeled somewhat on AWK syntax written with Python Lex Yacc for turning CSV data into matplotlib graphics. A custom web framework written in F# that compiles to JS with Fable. LLMs helped with looking up documentation, higher level architecture, fixing errors, and yes, plenty of boilerplate! All of this being said, I brought with me almost 30 years of experience writing software and a pretty good idea high level of how to go about building these things. The devil is in the details and that's where the LLM was most useful.
  • __loam 2y ago
    > Everywhere I look, blog posts use the same generic-looking AI art (I can't quite put it into words, but you probably know the look I'm talking about) They got that AI grease on them
    • Terr_ 2y ago
      Oh, that's easy, you just add the words "but don't make it look greasy", and as a bonus you're now a fully accredited Prompt Engineer! :p
      • xena 2y ago
        Realistically, you use models that make it easier to prompt away from greasiness: Positive prompt: 1girl, hacker, laptop, terminal, coffee, green hair, green eyes, ponytail, hoodie Negative prompt: worst quality, low quality, medium quality, deleted, lowres, comic, bad anatomy, bad hands, text, error, missing fingers, extra digit, fewer digits, cropped, jpeg artifacts, signature, watermark, username, blurry, looking at viewer Steps: 25, Sampler: DPM++ 3M SDE Karras, CFG scale: 7, Seed: 1313606321, Size: 768x384, Model hash: 51a0c178b7, Model: kohaku-xl, VAE hash: 235745af8d, VAE: kohaku-xl.safetensors, Denoising strength: 0.7, Hires resize: 2048x1024, Hires upscaler: Latent (bicubic), Version: v1.6.0-2-g4afaaf8a
        • __loam 2y ago
          Now you can be like every other obnoxious tech blogger putting ai art crap in their header.
    • verandaguy 2y ago
      Hah! That's actually a pretty good way of describing it.
  • wormius 2y ago
    The best is going to boingboing, and seeing that shit art everywhere, while they have posts whining about AI art. Be Consistent. You're just being part of the problem if you can't even abide by the basics. I never thought I would end up hating the whole tech world so much, and I thought "Crypto" was peak - but that was just a bunch of scammy dudes and rugpulls for suckers. This? Everyone is suckers. In theory there's a case to be made for it, but I trust none of the entities involved in pushing this out. For about 5 years I thought MS was going to do something good. WSL2 was actually good tech and they seemed to uh... "embrace" open source. But since 2020 I feel like things are just going downhill. My inner old man yells at the lawnmowermanchild : GET OFF MY LAWN.
• skyyler 2y ago
  A proxy server is not a controversial feature. The proxy server was not created through petabyte-scale plagiarism. A proxy server does not use half a million kilowatt hours of electricity a day. This is nothing like complaining that Firefox allows you to enable a proxy server. I use ChatGPT but I also think the AI detractors have some good points...
  • BobbyJo 2y ago
    If you think AI is bad, wait til you hear about humans... Im being facetious, but my point is that raw power/data usage isn't by itself a bad thing, as long as it is providing commensurate value. Now you can argue thy don't do that yet, but that would require a lt more nuance than "using resources bad".
    • skyyler 2y ago
      I don't think "AI bad" but I think some of the people saying "AI bad" have interesting reasons for saying so. For the record I believe a lot of the "AI Bad" discourse is a direct carryover from "NFT/Crypto Bad" discourse. A lot of the annoying voices that were loudly promoting NFTs and dodgy web3 companies two years ago are now LOUDLY promoting dodgy AI companies... Some of it still rings true, a lot of it seems like "twitter is still mad"
      • lxgr 2y ago
        The parallels even extend further: A lot of the people (largely correctly!) crying "scam" back then for crypto are now crying scam for AI. If I had to draw a historical analogy, it'd be to the dot com bubble: Yes, it was a bubble – yet the Internet turns out to have been real. It just was almost impossible to guess correctly as to which company would still be around after the bubble burst (to say nothing of the now-giants that didn't even exist back then). But that kind of bubble is very different from crypto, which so far has yet to prove that there was any substance to it, despite having gone through at least one global hype cycle and bubble burst two years ago. I don't recall there being two years of frantic search of an application for the web/Internet back in the early 2000s.
• joemi 2y ago
  I don't think it's uncommon for a feature to start as opt-in, then turn to opt-out, then finally turn to built-in, so it makes sense to me to be wary if the feature is something you don't want in something typically light and not-overburdened-by-features as a terminal emulator.
  • dewey 2y ago
    Yes, but you have to take into account what kind of product it is and who's the developer and their track record. It's different if a paid or ad supported product wants to increase the amount of people who use a feature vs. an open source developer adding a feature for people to use and having no benefit by people using it. iTerm already has a lot of advanced options and that's just one more of it.
    • Nullabillity 2y ago
      Relevant track record: the developer thought this would be a worthwhile "feature" to add. Frankly, that says enough. Even if they do eventually give in and remove it, the stain will still be there.
      • 9dev 2y ago
        You’re talking about someone publishing high quality open source software for over a decade that’s beloved by millions of users. Have some respect, man. You might disagree with the way a specific feature works, but this is absolutely no reason to talk about someone like Mr. Nachman this way.
        • dewey 2y ago
          100% this, it’s honestly a bit embarrassing reading through some of these comments or Gitlab issues (“I would donate if you remove this feature”) as a fellow developer. I expected a bit more of my peers on a developer focused tool.
          • 2y ago
• mvdtnz 2y ago
  > people really have too much fuckin time on their hands to bitch about things I always find it so puzzling when people say this. If this author has "too much time" what would the ideal society look like to you? Would you prefer to live in a society where every person is worked to the bone for optimal productivity, such that there is not even a spare 30 minutes in their week to write something that isn't generating economic output? I really want to know what you mean when you say this.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • justanotherjoe 2y ago
    I want to put my hand on people's shoulders and calmly say 'take it easy'. So many times when I'm reading hn.
• planetafro 2y ago
  Did you actually read the article? The conclusion is exactly what you state. No big deal. It's just a meandering and fun read. YMMV.
  • adamomada 2y ago
    I got the sense that he’s speaking of the same people the author of the post is speaking of in the article, not the author himself
    • zrail 2y ago
      > Please call me (order of preference): Xe/xer, They/them or She/her please. https://github.com/Xe https://github.com/Xe
      • adamomada 2y ago
        I don’t want to make more of it than it is, but reader mode cut that part out for me.
• hoherd 2y ago
  Having a proxy setting actually is a problem, which is why, for example, Microsoft Windows Server lets you create a policy that prevents users from configuring it. Codecierge allows terminal scrollback and its presumably unredacted data to be sent to a third party, it is a conduit for data exfiltration and may violate a whole bunch of compliance policies, so if it cannot be disabled, it may put companies in violation of those compliance certifications.
• akira2501 2y ago
  > It's absolutely rediculous that supporting something, thats opt-in not opt-out is causing a ruckus lol, people really have too much fuckin time on their hands to bitch about things. People have preferences. They find their preferences meaningful to them. This means there will always be a healthy competitive market of alternatives to choose from in order to serve those preferences. This is not a bad outcome. Why do you find it "worthy of ridicule?"
  • whimsicalism 2y ago
    preferences aren't above criticism, i see many people on the internet with the misapprehension that just because "it's an opinion" somehow ought to shield you from people being able to say "that's a dumb opinion"
    • akira2501 2y ago
      > preferences aren't above criticism Sure. I just wouldn't expect to get particularly far with that strategy. > ought to shield you from people being able to say "that's a dumb opinion" We're talking about a preference of which terminal emulator to use. Is there some larger social consequence that should be addressed this way? Having openly genocidal racist attitudes are "dumb opinions" that are worthy of public challenge. Whether or not I want to use iTerm2 because they added LLM interfaces is probably not.
      • whimsicalism 2y ago
        i feel like you are treating 'dumb' as synonymous with 'reprehensible'. worthy of public challenge? we're commenting on an internet forum. not using a terminal because it has added a feature that is opt-in seems silly to me, it doesn't have to be racist or genocidal to reach the threshold of 'worthy to comment on'
      • paulmd 2y ago
        you’re being silly on this just as much as you’re being silly about iterm yes, in the context of an internet discussion about iterm we can of course say that you’re being silly, even if genocide exists. Don’t be silly. not exactly like the front page of the NYT is discussing akira2501’s iterm stance instead of genocide, here, you’re just having an emotional tantrum over some random computer thing. people have just gotten silly over this whole thing, visceral emotional reaction is about right.
• thih9 2y ago
  This was fixed now. The article’s main point still stands IMO. I.e. that iterm2 focused on openai and not some local workflow by default. Optional or not, I’d like core features to be privacy friendly and provider agnostic. Otherwise a plugin might be a better fit. > I think that one of the greatest errors that was made with putting this in iTerm2 was making a big show of it, and by not letting you use local models (such as with Ollama) instead of having OpenAI be the only option.
  • ephimetheus 2y ago
    I think you can hardly call it “focused on”, when it’s one feature out many many updates made to the software. Alao I believe you can retarget the calls to a local instance of a model behind an OpenAI compatible API, and it will happily use that. Seems like lots of knee jerking going on.
    • thih9 2y ago
      I meant “focused on” in the sense that AI features specifically are focused on openai, to the point of mentioning openai only in the changelogs. I haven’t seen an official demo of using ai features with a local instance. I believe it should be the other way round, the focus should be on local (because again, this is provider agnostic and privacy friendly).
  • joshstrange 2y ago
    You can change the endpoint, which anyone could learn from reading the comments on the release yesterday or reading the wiki > I think that one of the greatest errors that was made with putting this in iTerm2 was making a big show of it, and by not letting you use local models (such as with Ollama) instead of having OpenAI be the only option. There is not a single line this is that is true. A big show was not made and you can use Ollama with it. The “big show” was made by other people not the developer behind iTerm2.
• mikl 2y ago
  Features you don’t use still add complexity, bugs and potential security and privacy issues.
  • paulmd 2y ago
    You can always fork it if you disagree with the direction of development. Everyone of course knows perfectly well that it’s not anywhere near that level of concern in reality, one might say just concern trolling in fact. But if you and enough other people really do feel strongly enough, you can maintain a security-focused fork with… removing an optional LLM thing that requires manually entering a key. Sure.
    • soraminazuki 2y ago
      Looking at the GitLab issue, I have much more trust in the current developer than whatever (pitch)forks that might appear out of there.
    • mikl 2y ago
      “If you don’t want to maintain your own terminal app, don’t criticize” The “love it or leave it” of the open source world. Sorry, I don’t buy that framing. No one should be immune from criticism.
      • dcow 2y ago
        Sure, but the gitlab thread is not respectful or constructive criticism. It’s a bunch of knee jerk users saying they can’t use iTerm2 anymore and overtly threatening and/or bribing the devs because they don’t like any product that includes a nice UX to interface with an “AI” language model.
• this_steve_j 2y ago
  Brave’s crypto reward features might be a better analogy, but I like the comparison. Fortunately I get paid to throw shade. Here is a free sample: “Unsupervised use of LLMs can increase the risk of exposing sensitive information. Mitigation strategies and capabilities are not mature. “Exploiting AI requires rapidly increasing the capital expenditures (input) per worker while the horizon for productivity gains (output) is uncharted and unknown.
  • joshstrange 2y ago
    Except LLMs have real value today unlike crypto which is mostly used for scams and speculative trading. That’s what makes this different from Brave. Also I don’t think the CEO has any integrity whereas the iTerm2 developer has been making an incredible product for free for over a decade.
• sangnoir 2y ago
  > It's absolutely rediculous that supporting something, thats opt-in not opt-out is causing a ruckus iTerm is pretty extensible, and there are other ways of making the AI bloat (IMO) opt-in, without including it in the core software. The biggest issue for me is that it increases the attack surface on iTerm2 with no tangible benefit (to me), I'd be similarly upset if they added an opt-in "Share on Facebook/StackOverflow" feature. I'd seriously consider switching to a purist fork that doesn't integrate social-media sharing as a core-feature of a terminal app.
  • benwaffle 2y ago
    > The biggest issue for me is that it increases the attack surface What's your threat model?
    • sangnoir 2y ago
      > What's your threat model? Why do you ask, will you help with designing a mitigation plan? I'll humor you: It's a turnkey gadget for sniffing/exfiltrating the output of any open iTerm2 shell.
      • dcow 2y ago
        Because you’re already using other software that has LLM integration. What specifically about this iterm2 impl makes the threat more real??
        • crtasm 2y ago
          How do you know what other software they are using?
          • dcow 2y ago
            Is someone not using GitHub these days? Or web search? Or macOS? Or Windows?