4 ms·
A slop fork machine is way different though, I dont know why authors never thought about this but imagine a machine that can detect the features and replicate
by lacedeconstruct 4mo ago
A slop fork machine is way different though, I dont know why authors never thought about this but imagine a machine that can detect the features and replicate whatever it sees, show it how to make bread once and it can do it infinitely, make it listen to a song and its able to find why it sounds the way it does and just spam variations, even if it doesnt make anything original it demotivates any attempt to push the boundaries or make anything new
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- josephg 4mo agoReally? I'm more motivated than ever to make stuff at the moment. I have a long list of projects I've always wanted to make, but I never had time. The barrier is so low now. For example, I want to make: - A mini OS on top of SeL4 - A UI framework based on SolidJS, for native apps, in rust. - My own photo manager (which can do backups & sync across all my devices). And a gallery to share photos with friends - A local first data store, built on top of CRDTs - My own programming language And lots more. Each of these projects on their own would take months of time. If LLMs can speed up development, that's great! I don't care if nobody else uses what I make. I want a personal computer full of my own software.
- lacedeconstruct 4mo ago*Make anything "new"
- josephg 4mo agoEverything I want to make is new. I don't understand the objection. For example, the photo backup system I want to make will let me manage my ~400gb photo library. I want my library backed up on a couple devices, running linux and freebsd. I want my mac and iphone to have a local mirror of all the favorited photos, and when I'm at home, I want to be able to browse all photos from those devices by streaming them over the local network. I want native macos & ios app interfaces to view and manage all that. I don't know any existing software that meets my requirements. I don't think any such software exists. Apple, Dropbox and Google will solve this problem for me if I store all my photos in their cloud and pay them an ongoing subscription for the privilege. I'd much rather make something myself, and back up my photos on my own hard drives. Making something like this is simple enough, but very time consuming. If claude can take the drudgery out of it, well, I think that's just delightful.
- uncognic 4mo agoTake a look at https://immich.app/ https://immich.app/
- josephg 4mo agoOh that looks lovely. I enjoy the UI and all the work on tagging and classification. But its still missing some features I want: - I want native desktop apps - I want P2P device sync. My laptop and my home server should be peers. Just with different rules for which photos are stored locally on each device. - I want per-device storage rules. (Eg, "I want all my favorited photos, and recent photos up to 50gb on my laptop"). - Backups. I want to be able to plug in an external hard drive and backup my photos (with some rules). Then disconnect the drive and see in the metadata for those photos that I have a copy of the full res RAW on that drive. But even if other programs exist, its still fun to make something myself. Authoring your own software gives you a different relationship with the computer. You're less of a consumer. You can change or tweak features on a whim. Psychologically, its kind of like being in your own home vs being in a hotel room. If you hate the furniture at home, you can move it or change it. You can decorate however you like. In a hotel, you're affected by your environment but you have no agency over it. I think its much more healthy to create.
- rrvsh 4mo agoYou're not wrong, but a fork of Immich would achieve much of the same, no? I understand this is probably a detour from the conversation, but I've been thinking of doing the same to add some niceties
- josephg 4mo agoIf my goal was to make something that fits in with the existing ecosystem and has the most users possible, I could do that. Try to make some changes which could possibly be upstreamed. Spend my time going back and forth on minutia in github pull requests. Learn Dart. Figure out how to wrap a typescript & dart app in a macOS native window. Or turn to electron. (Yuck.) But I’m optimising for the feeling of joy and agency over my tools. I also want to experiment with p2p / local first data structures in a real app. I could fork immich and rewrite the data model. But that all seems much less fun. At the end of the day, I’m not doing this for other people. I’m doing this for me. Learning dart so I can hack on someone else’s code sounds like a pain in the butt. Not like something I’d want to do for fun on the weekend. Working on someone else’s code seems like a strange default. You and others have jumped on me for wanting to make my own thing instead of using - or forking - someone else’s software. Can you help me understand why? Why would that be the default for a fun hobby project? I’m confused.
- cryo32 4mo agoLeisure projects for me at least are about the personal challenge and achievement. If the LLM does it, you achieved nothing.
- r2_pilot 4mo agoI'm glad that you find achievement in the personal challenge. At home, I'm just getting things done. Small things, bigger things, and best of all I get to pet the dog more while it works in the background.
- cryo32 4mo agoYeah so don't bother. I don't write code at home. What's the point? I go on holiday once a month!
- whstl 4mo agoAre you assuming that "using a LLM" automatically means "vibe coding"? Is it not engineering anymore even if you micromanage and relegate the machine to a better typist, following patterns and doing research around?
- josephg 4mo ago> If the LLM does it, you achieved nothing. Oh get off your high horse. You may as well say "If the compiler compiles your code, you achieved nothing". Its the same argument. I love meaty algorithmic challenges. And I enjoy the design challenge of making a piece of software. But I don't write CSS for fun. Debugging styling issues on mobile? I hate it. LLMs let me work on the parts that I find enjoyable and satisfying. Like UI design, or figuring out the data model. And then I can delegate the parts I don't like to Claude. It seems very happy to bang away at CSS. That's a great deal. If you want to personally write every line of code, good for you. But don't police my leisure projects.
- throwaway13337 4mo agoI feel the same way as you. But was unfortunately not surprised to see the replies you are getting here. There are a ton of opportunities available right now to make new things. And make them better, more customizable, and more sovereign. To the replies: be the change you want to see in the world, guys. That may be trite but focusing only on the negative will just make your own life shitty.
- ori_b 4mo agoAnd you're actually excited by the prospect of buying them from Anthropic instead of making them?
- satvikpendem 4mo agoOpen weight models exist and are good enough to make the projects above.
- ori_b 4mo agoAnd you're actually excited about these table scraps that companies couldn't even monetize, rather than making something?
- satvikpendem 4mo agoCouldn't even monetize? DeepSeek and Alibaba with Qwen are doing quite well, no table scraps required. I am making things, I don't have to physically type letters on a keyboard to make things as long as the output of what I want exists.
- rrvsh 4mo agoYou are being needlessly combative. Please take a step back and look at what you are doing - I don't think this is positive for you or anybody
- josephg 4mo agoSuppose you're the senior engineer on a project. You design the UI of the software. Then design how you want the software to work internally. Then write the core data structures. And then guide a bunch of junior engineers to write the code, review their work. Is that the same as buying a computer program from anthropic? I have a friend who's an architect. Sometimes we're in the city and he says "Oh see that building? Its one of mine." He didn't lay the concrete, or do the wiring or anything. Should he not be proud, because a construction company built each floor? Does it not count? Does his contribution not matter?
- sillyfluke 4mo agoI support this take especially since you added the "I don't care if nobody else uses what I make", but you should at least acknowledge what you're talking about is pretty unrelated to the article, as the author's entire context seems to be making something for other people to use and building it together with other people. Since you said you want to make those things that you list, I assume none of these things have been built yet. If so, I would encourage you to consider how excited you will be to constantly maintain those things you build. But even if the maintainence cycle won't be as exciting, since you are the sole user you have the advantage of being able to proceed at a leisurely pace even while doing maintainence work. In a professional setting, the dopamine hit of being able to build something quickly that works in an area that you have little to no knowledge in makes you more dependent on the AI in the maintaince cycle as you want to chase that dopamine high by maintaining the same development speed. This in turn leads to a bigger burnout crash after that peak dopamine hit. Maintainence is a phase of diminishing returns even without AI, but when your coding agents are introducing new bugs at record pace with their bugfixes with no new features to write home about you are in a special place in Hell. I'm all for using AI to build ambitious projects. I have yet to see a person/company/organization continuously release huge software endeavours in a stable professional manner day in and day out with a coding agent harem in tow. If something like the Ladybird browser, or any browser that is "built by scratch", achieved Chrome parity in six months and consistently maintained the same level of stability with continuous releases then I would see that as proof that this approach has become professionaly sustainable. The reason people are getting away with so much using AI is because of the open secret in most enterprise engineering practices: the customer cares more about the response time for fixes they report than they do about overall or longterm product quality.
- josephg 4mo ago> I would encourage you to consider how excited you will be to constantly maintain those things you build. Why should I consider that? Its funny how the default with programming is that the piece of software exists forever. I've been learning to play the piano lately. The default with piano is that every piece is ephemeral. If I don't go out of my way to record something I play, after the notes have run out, the piece is gone forever. The same is true of cooking - except you can't record a meal at all. Once you eat it, its gone. Lots of art forms are like this - theatre. Dance. The circus. They're no less beautiful for being ephemeral. Why do we assume software has to be maintained indefinitely? Why even think about that right now? Maybe I'll work on these projects for awhile, maintain them as long as I want, and then in a few years someone will make something way better and I'll use that instead? Would that make the effort I put in pointless? I don't think so. I think it would make programming more like playing the piano. How lovely. > I'm all for using AI to build ambitious projects. I have yet to see a person/company/organization continuously release huge software endeavours in a stable professional manner day in and day out with a coding agent harem in tow. Yes, I've burned through enough claude tokens now that I find myself agreeing with you. I wouldn't use an LLM to make and maintain google chrome. But I wasn't planning on doing that anyway. There are also a lot more options than (1) write everything yourself and (2) vibe code the whole thing. LLMs are good at small-to-medium scope tasks right now. Fine. I'll use them - or not use them - with their limitations in mind.
- slopinthebag 4mo agoThe issue is maintenance. If you want to use these projects for important things, you need to maintain them. If you don't want to maintain them, I can't see myself using them for anything important. I actually want less software for myself. Less things to maintain. I've become a "digital minimalist" in that I use very few software, only ones maintained by others who can afford and are willing to keep them working.
- josephg 4mo agoSome people find freedom in building their own house. Some people find freedom in living in a serviced apartment. Some people find joy in home cooked meals. To others, wealth is never needing to cook again. To each their own. As for maintenance, I think LLMs are actually very well suited for small maintenance tasks. The expensive part of programming is loading and unloading context into my head. "Oh dear, what is all this code doing? Oh no, coffeescript? And some ancient version of express JS? How does any of this work?". LLMs can bomb in, fix a compilation error and bomb out. "This program isn't compiling any more on macos X.Y.Z. Read the patch notes. Figure out why and fix the problem." Perfect.
- baddash 4mo agoI argue the opposite, that originality will actually become more valuable. Think about it: everyone has characterized AI slop, as slop. Which means that we negatively value it in terms of originality. Combine that with the fact that there will be a lot of it, this means that original work will 1. stand out or be very distinct from slop, and 2. have its value amplified as a result of this polarization. basically, we value originality more AND are able to identify it more readily. related is also the fact that originality will literally be valuable as training data for future models
- doright 4mo agoI can prod at a model as much as I want to produce something I find more original than average, but there are plenty of people out there that will say it doesn't count because of the fact an AI made it. "Slop" doesn't just mean "it sucks because it's bad", it often means "it's sucks because it's AI". They'd argue that if you were creative enough to produce something so original you wouldn't rely on an AI to make it for you. It's tainted by association, all the way back to the multi-billion-dollar enterprises that originally trained the models for their own ends. Also there have been dozens of HN submissions and comments where the poster didn't even bother to remove the em dashes. Most people just don't care. The people who continue to post like this wouldn't have been as visible had they not discovered AI and pounced on it, but they were always there. The idea of posting with an AI voice, em-dashes and all, would likely have still appealed to them if you'd asked 5-10 years ago. Nowadays it takes hardly any energy for them to have a persistent voice.
- baddash 4mo agoI also define "slop" in a similar way. However, I specifically define it as creations that lack soul or originality. And can actually have a high degree of quality in some aspects, as you can see with some AI generated art and music. Because of this, I'm tempted to adopt a different term since "slop" feels too negative Slop has always been around. AI has cheapened its creation.
- lacedeconstruct 4mo agoDepends on how good the slop fork machine is, the act of true original creation is a messy and long process if it can be replicated to death immediately basically for free its not viable anymore