6 ms·

Great talk, more for the new-developer than the cynical seasoned pro but I love the direction.

throwanem 2y ago
As a cynical, seasoned pro, I loved it and I love the ideas behind it. The only note I have is that I don't think it's really accurate to say this approach wasn't possible in 2004. I was a working web dev in 2004, and from that perspective, what we did was pretty close to what the talk describes. Intermediated by commerce, certainly; as I recall having put it one day in that same job after hanging up a call wherein had occasioned a request that $400 a month of backhaul be provided free of charge, it's nice there's folks out there trying to save the world, but some of us have to earn a living. ("You said you were a web dev. Why were you talking to anyone about backhaul?" I pulled cable too sometimes, in those days. The mid-00s were a different time.) And of course there were no LLMs involved, that technology then still being much the stuff of science fiction and allied fields like futurism. Even so, though: none of us had any real idea what we were doing, but we knew how to figure out what worked and what didn't, and that was usually enough even if the level of trial and error, and the lack of rigor, were shocking by today's standards. (I wrote my first SPA, a triathlon registration system for an org that lots of folks in the DMV might recall if I mentioned a name, in 2011. Imagine my surprise when two years later, on leaving my local backwater of web dev for the mainstream, I discovered that was what I had done, when I thought I'd just been trying a wild idea I was sure would fail, because it was that or lose the contract that was keeping the business afloat...) Honestly, the vision described in this talk is a lot more like the kind of life I thought I'd live, when I got into this line around the turn of the millennium. It'd be easy to take an overly rosy view, and maybe I am. But then too, it'd be good if not every quarter-square-mile neighborhoodlet in my city had an intimate dependency on Amazon in order to function, too.
zer00eyz 2y ago
> the cynical seasoned pro Im that guy. She is way off the mark on some trivial points in there and they are easy to overlook. Right now the big players are pouring money into hardware. There is a lot of talent out on the street. If they aren't resting and vesting in those orgs what are they going to do? It's possible for a small team to bootstrap with ZERO money. How much do you need to earn enough to support 3 devs? Apple only takes 15% if you make less than a million a year. Is that a staff of 3? They only take 15 percent of subscriptions!!! That dosen't include android. If you dont piss away money on on cloud (vps), on everything as a service (login, metrics) the economics are amazing. There's room in the market for 1000 founders who do very well, you wont be google but you can live a more than comfortable life.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  But the app store experience is to push people to ever bigger and bigger apps. We don't incrementally explore & expand our competency, we don't augment human intellect, we don't form man-machine symbiosis: we get pushed to the biggest already most successful apps, that leave us supplicants to their ever changing laws & dictums. The app stores by their nature don't actually let people into computing. They are the sad old pre-connected paradigm, entrenching top down systems control. What Maggie is tapping into is more than the 15/30% cut. It's about possibility & connection, about software we have power over & can shape & share. The software we have today is all dead software, delivered to us on a platter, and that dead modality is not befitting the greatness humanity can & should be tapping into. Local First is inherently not bound, not fixed into interaction with the golems created by far off others. It allows more. It allows soul. That earnest engage-ability is something that's been missing from the consumerized world, has created enormous disbelief & disdain in a place where hope & possibility once sprung freely. http://malleable.systems http://malleable.systems now! ---- Regarding whether users will or not? Local First has a set of first principles to keep us from being too bound by software. The particular tools we have at any given point are arbitrary, secondary. Who knows what would happen if we did have the capabilities, because right now we don't have the capabilities. Yes, Local First is about bootstrapping something new. No it doesn't create the barefoot developers automatically, doesn't make that imminent. But it makes it possible. And some will convert in, some will start being barefoot developers as it becomes possible. If & only if we make it possible. The cynicism about those who won't or the state of our tools is not yet due.
  - zer00eyz 2y ago
    > we have power over & can shape & share This is where She's being way too optimistic. What we have now is software that looks like macdonalds. She thinks the tools we have are going to enable home cooking. Software is way harder than that. The step between is "local" restaurants. You dont need to build software for 8 billion people, or 300 million Americans. You can build for a region, or a niche group. > It allows more. It allows soul. You might not be old enough to remember zine's but they were a thing. We're about to have the software equivalent.
jay_kyburz 2y ago
All the stuff in the first half sound great, but adding an llm dependency is a complete antithesis to local first and well crafted software. I don't really like the term barefoot developers, but local craftsman should own and understand the tools they work with and the code they write. Their tools should be local first as well.
- throwanem 2y ago
  It's not conceived as an LLM dependency, but really more similar to the way I currently use LLMs as an engineer: as a consultant. I don't think current models are up to that task on their own, certainly not for someone without significant programming knowledge - but the sense I got, especially as the talk touched on still needing access to a skilled dev for a while at least, was that the author also understands this. Too, in sketching out so broad a vision as this, I wouldn't necessarily expect any author to treat what's possible today as a hard limit, any more than anyone else working in tech does or should. I also don't understand why you'd consider LLMs as a blocker to local-only. You can run a 7B model on a $600 refurbished M1 Mac mini today. It won't be the fastest or the cleverest, and you probably will need an hour or so from someone who knows how to set up Ollama and Open WebUI, but it is absolutely usable after that with no Internet connection at all - I have a Mac mini so configured on my desk right now, actually. Or for an order of magnitude more outlay, you can get a Studio capable of supporting multiple concurrent users with 70B models producing tokens faster than you can read them. Again, sure, it won't be GPT-4o, and it won't be up to the standard of the sorts of tools described in the talk - not this year, anyway. In 2026 or 2027, though? Again, this talk looks to a possible future, not just today. And with a setup based on open models running locally as I've described, there is the countervailing advantage that once you have it, you own it. As for the term 'barefoot developer' itself - it's a cavil, I grant, but I still want to quibble, because as a child in rural Mississippi with an Apple IIc and a couple of books, I was a barefoot developer, writing my own programs to solve my own problems, and often enough going to play in the woods by the road cut when I got stuck. (It helped! These days I'm more likely to chase wasps with a camera, but it still helps, when I can force the time. For what it's worth, though, I do wear shoes these days.) Now I'm what Amazon would call an L5, earning as highly as almost anyone in this generation of my family - and not for a lot of student debt, because I never went to college. Whatever I am as a professional, I am in large part because I've been discovering and developing my craft since my single-digit days - and was free to do so without my parents having to pay anyone a damned subscription, besides. True, the technology has grown far away from the kind of locally and individually empowering model this talk describes, and that I recall from my own childhood and early career days - that proto-SPA I mentioned nearby, for example, was hosted on a machine that everyone who ever worked on it could physically touch without leaving the office we all shared. And this in 2011! It really has not been that long a time since a model very much like what this talk describes was actually present in reality. I see no reason in principle why that can't be true again. Certainly I'm convinced that it should.

As a cynical, seasoned pro, I loved it and I love the ideas behind it. The only note I have is that I don't think it's really accurate to say this approach wasn't possible in 2004. I was a working web dev in 2004, and from that perspective, what we did was pretty close to what the talk describes. Intermediated by commerce, certainly; as I recall having put it one day in that same job after hanging up a call wherein had occasioned a request that $400 a month of backhaul be provided free of charge, it's nice there's folks out there trying to save the world, but some of us have to earn a living. ("You said you were a web dev. Why were you talking to anyone about backhaul?" I pulled cable too sometimes, in those days. The mid-00s were a different time.) And of course there were no LLMs involved, that technology then still being much the stuff of science fiction and allied fields like futurism. Even so, though: none of us had any real idea what we were doing, but we knew how to figure out what worked and what didn't, and that was usually enough even if the level of trial and error, and the lack of rigor, were shocking by today's standards. (I wrote my first SPA, a triathlon registration system for an org that lots of folks in the DMV might recall if I mentioned a name, in 2011. Imagine my surprise when two years later, on leaving my local backwater of web dev for the mainstream, I discovered that was what I had done, when I thought I'd just been trying a wild idea I was sure would fail, because it was that or lose the contract that was keeping the business afloat...) Honestly, the vision described in this talk is a lot more like the kind of life I thought I'd live, when I got into this line around the turn of the millennium. It'd be easy to take an overly rosy view, and maybe I am. But then too, it'd be good if not every quarter-square-mile neighborhoodlet in my city had an intimate dependency on Amazon in order to function, too.

zer00eyz 2y ago

> the cynical seasoned pro Im that guy. She is way off the mark on some trivial points in there and they are easy to overlook. Right now the big players are pouring money into hardware. There is a lot of talent out on the street. If they aren't resting and vesting in those orgs what are they going to do? It's possible for a small team to bootstrap with ZERO money. How much do you need to earn enough to support 3 devs? Apple only takes 15% if you make less than a million a year. Is that a staff of 3? They only take 15 percent of subscriptions!!! That dosen't include android. If you dont piss away money on on cloud (vps), on everything as a service (login, metrics) the economics are amazing. There's room in the market for 1000 founders who do very well, you wont be google but you can live a more than comfortable life.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago
But the app store experience is to push people to ever bigger and bigger apps. We don't incrementally explore & expand our competency, we don't augment human intellect, we don't form man-machine symbiosis: we get pushed to the biggest already most successful apps, that leave us supplicants to their ever changing laws & dictums. The app stores by their nature don't actually let people into computing. They are the sad old pre-connected paradigm, entrenching top down systems control. What Maggie is tapping into is more than the 15/30% cut. It's about possibility & connection, about software we have power over & can shape & share. The software we have today is all dead software, delivered to us on a platter, and that dead modality is not befitting the greatness humanity can & should be tapping into. Local First is inherently not bound, not fixed into interaction with the golems created by far off others. It allows more. It allows soul. That earnest engage-ability is something that's been missing from the consumerized world, has created enormous disbelief & disdain in a place where hope & possibility once sprung freely. http://malleable.systems http://malleable.systems now! ---- Regarding whether users will or not? Local First has a set of first principles to keep us from being too bound by software. The particular tools we have at any given point are arbitrary, secondary. Who knows what would happen if we did have the capabilities, because right now we don't have the capabilities. Yes, Local First is about bootstrapping something new. No it doesn't create the barefoot developers automatically, doesn't make that imminent. But it makes it possible. And some will convert in, some will start being barefoot developers as it becomes possible. If & only if we make it possible. The cynicism about those who won't or the state of our tools is not yet due.
- zer00eyz 2y ago
  > we have power over & can shape & share This is where She's being way too optimistic. What we have now is software that looks like macdonalds. She thinks the tools we have are going to enable home cooking. Software is way harder than that. The step between is "local" restaurants. You dont need to build software for 8 billion people, or 300 million Americans. You can build for a region, or a niche group. > It allows more. It allows soul. You might not be old enough to remember zine's but they were a thing. We're about to have the software equivalent.

jay_kyburz 2y ago

All the stuff in the first half sound great, but adding an llm dependency is a complete antithesis to local first and well crafted software. I don't really like the term barefoot developers, but local craftsman should own and understand the tools they work with and the code they write. Their tools should be local first as well.

throwanem 2y ago
It's not conceived as an LLM dependency, but really more similar to the way I currently use LLMs as an engineer: as a consultant. I don't think current models are up to that task on their own, certainly not for someone without significant programming knowledge - but the sense I got, especially as the talk touched on still needing access to a skilled dev for a while at least, was that the author also understands this. Too, in sketching out so broad a vision as this, I wouldn't necessarily expect any author to treat what's possible today as a hard limit, any more than anyone else working in tech does or should. I also don't understand why you'd consider LLMs as a blocker to local-only. You can run a 7B model on a $600 refurbished M1 Mac mini today. It won't be the fastest or the cleverest, and you probably will need an hour or so from someone who knows how to set up Ollama and Open WebUI, but it is absolutely usable after that with no Internet connection at all - I have a Mac mini so configured on my desk right now, actually. Or for an order of magnitude more outlay, you can get a Studio capable of supporting multiple concurrent users with 70B models producing tokens faster than you can read them. Again, sure, it won't be GPT-4o, and it won't be up to the standard of the sorts of tools described in the talk - not this year, anyway. In 2026 or 2027, though? Again, this talk looks to a possible future, not just today. And with a setup based on open models running locally as I've described, there is the countervailing advantage that once you have it, you own it. As for the term 'barefoot developer' itself - it's a cavil, I grant, but I still want to quibble, because as a child in rural Mississippi with an Apple IIc and a couple of books, I was a barefoot developer, writing my own programs to solve my own problems, and often enough going to play in the woods by the road cut when I got stuck. (It helped! These days I'm more likely to chase wasps with a camera, but it still helps, when I can force the time. For what it's worth, though, I do wear shoes these days.) Now I'm what Amazon would call an L5, earning as highly as almost anyone in this generation of my family - and not for a lot of student debt, because I never went to college. Whatever I am as a professional, I am in large part because I've been discovering and developing my craft since my single-digit days - and was free to do so without my parents having to pay anyone a damned subscription, besides. True, the technology has grown far away from the kind of locally and individually empowering model this talk describes, and that I recall from my own childhood and early career days - that proto-SPA I mentioned nearby, for example, was hosted on a machine that everyone who ever worked on it could physically touch without leaving the office we all shared. And this in 2011! It really has not been that long a time since a model very much like what this talk describes was actually present in reality. I see no reason in principle why that can't be true again. Certainly I'm convinced that it should.