6 ms·

It _does_ look really cool, genuinely, but calling it a "labour of love" and then having AI write the readme/docs seems conflicting.

noir_lord 16d ago
[flagged]
- gizajob 16d ago
  [flagged]
  - noir_lord 16d ago
    [flagged]
    - gizajob 16d ago
      I only accept responses in Hex I’m afraid.
      - Frenchgeek 16d ago
        +++ Out Of Cheese Error +++ +++ Redo From Start +++
        deleted 16d ago
        [deleted]
        noir_lord 16d ago
        Never not upvoting a Discworld reference :).
    - onraglanroad 16d ago
      I genuinely found it funny that you thought "go fuck yourself" would be either effective or off-putting to someone with the username "gizajob". You know Boys from the Black Stuff right?
      - gizajob 16d ago
        10/10 great knowledge.
    - alt227 16d ago
      I think you just proved the parents point.
    - tomhow 14d ago
      > go fuck yourself This is an unacceptable comment on HN, no matter who or what you're replying to. You've been here long enough to know that. It's fine to disagree with people about code generation, but the guidelines still have to apply. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
in_absentia 16d ago
Long-form comments in the code are AI-written too, so I assume the whole thing is vibecoded. I guess my question is why. This is obviously not a piece of software anyone will ever use. If the author didn't do this for themselves - to learn, to show off their skills - then why bring it to life? In business, there's this saying that "when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric". I guess LLMs also make that true for hobby projects that used to make up a good portion of HN. We'd celebrate a project like that not because it's useful, but because it's a triumph of human ingenuity and a celebration of a personal achievement for the author. But now, it isn't, so is it still something we ought to celebrate?
- shevy-java 16d ago
  > why bring it to life? I think all AI projects should die, but if your question is aimed as to "why to publish it on github", then why not? Others could look at the code and learn from it (perhaps); and it is easier to distribute it that way too, in many cases. So I don't fully agree with the assumption that it would be automatically useless. Personally I won't use AI slop projects. It already annoys me to no ends that AI skynet successfully took over ruby development. I don't feel like even giving any feedback, as a few ruby devs such as Hiroshi Shibata, only interact with other beings via AI slop spam via claude; suddenly newly gained "perfect english language skills". It is all so fake now when AI infiltrates projects.
  - gizajob 16d ago
    You’ve officially reached the “you pesky kids get off my lawn” stage in your interest in computing.
  - kejdjejxjejdj 16d ago
    Not all AI-assisted projects are AI-slop. The fact that you think so only tells me that you’re deeply insecure about your knowledge of a subject that you’re interested in.
- gizajob 16d ago
  >Why bring it to life? Why not? The author wanted it, and had wanted it for about four decades since trying and failing as a child due to the difficulty of the task. If you’re in a certain frame of mind, then “why bring it to life?” can be directed at any kind of cultural work to negate it out of existence.
api 16d ago
I wonder: was there a time when using a compiler was considered cheating? "Real men" code everything in ASM! I do recall a whole era when using a GUI was considered cheating and denigrated as a "point and drool" interface (a play on "point and click"). Is using a combine cheating in farming? Is a nail gun or using prefab wall sections cheating in home construction? Is a 3D printer cheating in fabrication? If someone prints something with a 3D printer, do we say "you didn't make that, the printer did!" I find it weird for people who like technology to be so averse to tools that automate labor since that is literally what all technology is, and a tool to automate intellectual labor is literally what a computer is. A machine is a thing whose purpose is to provide leverage to amplify human effort and more rapidly realize human intent in some domain. Maybe it comes from a category error. AI is kind of a hand-wavey term, since most people think it means the thing is sentient. It's not. It has zero intent, zero motivation, zero ability to choose anything not already in its training data, and it will go precisely where its context window (and training data) guide it. It's a tool, a machine, and like any other machine it is set in motion by the user and guided by the user. The "choices" it makes are latent in its data or structure, or implied by its prompt. (Yes sometimes they can be surprising, but that's true of all complex machines.) Actual sentient AI does not exist. It might someday but it does not today. I suspect it requires a very different kind of system with continuous learning, dynamical state, and feedback, and a goal function tied somehow to thermodynamics in the real physical world the way ours is, but that's pure hypothesis on my part. We don't even have rigorous definitions for such things.
- robin_reala 16d ago
  The critical difference I think is deterministic vs non-deterministic. A compiler isn’t the correct comparison, it’s reading out your desired specs to a team member who does the actual engineering work.
  - kejdjejxjejdj 16d ago
    > it’s reading out your desired specs to a team member who does the actual engineering work Congratulations, you just discovered ”delegating”. I hope you don’t have anyone reporting to you at the moment because if this simple concept sounds demeaning to you… wow.
tahoemph999 16d ago
Thinking of and expressing the functionality of the thing might be the labor of love for this person. Their definition of labor doesn't have to be yours.
- tarkin2 16d ago
  Their labour didn’t involve coding. When we equate labour to creating a load of prompts then it feels hollow to me. Was this, then, done to impress others rather than enrich the coders skills and experience? The futuristic equivalent of pressing the “demo” button on old electronic keyboard and pretending to play
  - kejdjejxjejdj 16d ago
    > it feels hollow to me I don’t think there’s ever been a more accurate and appropriate moment to say: that sounds like a you problem. If you think computer science is only about manually writing lines of code yourself then goodness me you have SO MUCH to learn. > Was this, then, done to impress others rather than enrich the coders skills and experience? So coding is only valid when it “enriches the coders skills and experience”? How do you define those? Better yet, WHO is defining those? Are you so narrow minded and decidedly contrarian that you simply refuse to think of any other reason the dev might’ve done this for? I don’t wanna tell you you need to touch grass but goodness me you really ought to consider opening your mind to the fact that you are not the centre of the universe. > The futuristic equivalent of pressing the “demo” button on old electronic keyboard and pretending to play These two things do not equate in the slightest and the fact that you think they do is utterly depressing.
ghusto 16d ago
Why do you say it's written by AI?
- flohofwoe 16d ago
  Not the parent, but it reads a lot like written by AI. It has that typical breathless style that's exhausting just from reading. Also, looking at the code, the whole project looks vibe coded, no human would write such comments. Everything in a single git commit also looks "suspicious". It's cool that LLMs can write Z80 asm now, but yeah "labour of love"... tsk tsk tsk...
  - kejdjejxjejdj 16d ago
    > but yeah "labour of love"... tsk tsk tsk... What precludes this from being a labour of love, exactly?
    - jameshart 16d ago
      I think some people prefer their labours of love to involve the expenditure of actual labour.
      - kejdjejxjejdj 15d ago
        So planning, debugging, speccing, thinking, rethinking, designing, etc… do not count as labour? Please, do give me a list of what constitutes labour.
    - flohofwoe 15d ago
      When your manager gives you the task of building a complex product with a more or less vague "do what I mean" specification, and once a week shows up for 2 minutes to nudge you into a different direction, would you agree when the manager calls this his own "labour of love" when you did 99% of the actual work and thousands of micro-decisions along the way that your manager didn't even know had to be made?
progbits 16d ago
> Licence > > MIT, see LICENSE. Nothing here is derived from anyone else's code. Right... Except the whole thing being generated by a model derived from everyone's code. I'm not even sure I'm against licensing it as MIT but maybe stop with the ridiculous claims on top of that?

noir_lord 16d ago

[flagged]

gizajob 16d ago
[flagged]
- noir_lord 16d ago
  [flagged]
  - gizajob 16d ago
    I only accept responses in Hex I’m afraid.
    - Frenchgeek 16d ago
      +++ Out Of Cheese Error +++ +++ Redo From Start +++
      - deleted 16d ago
        [deleted]
      - noir_lord 16d ago
        Never not upvoting a Discworld reference :).
  - onraglanroad 16d ago
    I genuinely found it funny that you thought "go fuck yourself" would be either effective or off-putting to someone with the username "gizajob". You know Boys from the Black Stuff right?
    - gizajob 16d ago
      10/10 great knowledge.
  - alt227 16d ago
    I think you just proved the parents point.
  - tomhow 14d ago
    > go fuck yourself This is an unacceptable comment on HN, no matter who or what you're replying to. You've been here long enough to know that. It's fine to disagree with people about code generation, but the guidelines still have to apply. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

in_absentia 16d ago

Long-form comments in the code are AI-written too, so I assume the whole thing is vibecoded. I guess my question is why. This is obviously not a piece of software anyone will ever use. If the author didn't do this for themselves - to learn, to show off their skills - then why bring it to life? In business, there's this saying that "when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric". I guess LLMs also make that true for hobby projects that used to make up a good portion of HN. We'd celebrate a project like that not because it's useful, but because it's a triumph of human ingenuity and a celebration of a personal achievement for the author. But now, it isn't, so is it still something we ought to celebrate?

shevy-java 16d ago
> why bring it to life? I think all AI projects should die, but if your question is aimed as to "why to publish it on github", then why not? Others could look at the code and learn from it (perhaps); and it is easier to distribute it that way too, in many cases. So I don't fully agree with the assumption that it would be automatically useless. Personally I won't use AI slop projects. It already annoys me to no ends that AI skynet successfully took over ruby development. I don't feel like even giving any feedback, as a few ruby devs such as Hiroshi Shibata, only interact with other beings via AI slop spam via claude; suddenly newly gained "perfect english language skills". It is all so fake now when AI infiltrates projects.
- gizajob 16d ago
  You’ve officially reached the “you pesky kids get off my lawn” stage in your interest in computing.
- kejdjejxjejdj 16d ago
  Not all AI-assisted projects are AI-slop. The fact that you think so only tells me that you’re deeply insecure about your knowledge of a subject that you’re interested in.
gizajob 16d ago
>Why bring it to life? Why not? The author wanted it, and had wanted it for about four decades since trying and failing as a child due to the difficulty of the task. If you’re in a certain frame of mind, then “why bring it to life?” can be directed at any kind of cultural work to negate it out of existence.

api 16d ago

I wonder: was there a time when using a compiler was considered cheating? "Real men" code everything in ASM! I do recall a whole era when using a GUI was considered cheating and denigrated as a "point and drool" interface (a play on "point and click"). Is using a combine cheating in farming? Is a nail gun or using prefab wall sections cheating in home construction? Is a 3D printer cheating in fabrication? If someone prints something with a 3D printer, do we say "you didn't make that, the printer did!" I find it weird for people who like technology to be so averse to tools that automate labor since that is literally what all technology is, and a tool to automate intellectual labor is literally what a computer is. A machine is a thing whose purpose is to provide leverage to amplify human effort and more rapidly realize human intent in some domain. Maybe it comes from a category error. AI is kind of a hand-wavey term, since most people think it means the thing is sentient. It's not. It has zero intent, zero motivation, zero ability to choose anything not already in its training data, and it will go precisely where its context window (and training data) guide it. It's a tool, a machine, and like any other machine it is set in motion by the user and guided by the user. The "choices" it makes are latent in its data or structure, or implied by its prompt. (Yes sometimes they can be surprising, but that's true of all complex machines.) Actual sentient AI does not exist. It might someday but it does not today. I suspect it requires a very different kind of system with continuous learning, dynamical state, and feedback, and a goal function tied somehow to thermodynamics in the real physical world the way ours is, but that's pure hypothesis on my part. We don't even have rigorous definitions for such things.

robin_reala 16d ago
The critical difference I think is deterministic vs non-deterministic. A compiler isn’t the correct comparison, it’s reading out your desired specs to a team member who does the actual engineering work.
- kejdjejxjejdj 16d ago
  > it’s reading out your desired specs to a team member who does the actual engineering work Congratulations, you just discovered ”delegating”. I hope you don’t have anyone reporting to you at the moment because if this simple concept sounds demeaning to you… wow.

tahoemph999 16d ago

Thinking of and expressing the functionality of the thing might be the labor of love for this person. Their definition of labor doesn't have to be yours.

tarkin2 16d ago
Their labour didn’t involve coding. When we equate labour to creating a load of prompts then it feels hollow to me. Was this, then, done to impress others rather than enrich the coders skills and experience? The futuristic equivalent of pressing the “demo” button on old electronic keyboard and pretending to play
- kejdjejxjejdj 16d ago
  > it feels hollow to me I don’t think there’s ever been a more accurate and appropriate moment to say: that sounds like a you problem. If you think computer science is only about manually writing lines of code yourself then goodness me you have SO MUCH to learn. > Was this, then, done to impress others rather than enrich the coders skills and experience? So coding is only valid when it “enriches the coders skills and experience”? How do you define those? Better yet, WHO is defining those? Are you so narrow minded and decidedly contrarian that you simply refuse to think of any other reason the dev might’ve done this for? I don’t wanna tell you you need to touch grass but goodness me you really ought to consider opening your mind to the fact that you are not the centre of the universe. > The futuristic equivalent of pressing the “demo” button on old electronic keyboard and pretending to play These two things do not equate in the slightest and the fact that you think they do is utterly depressing.

ghusto 16d ago

Why do you say it's written by AI?

flohofwoe 16d ago
Not the parent, but it reads a lot like written by AI. It has that typical breathless style that's exhausting just from reading. Also, looking at the code, the whole project looks vibe coded, no human would write such comments. Everything in a single git commit also looks "suspicious". It's cool that LLMs can write Z80 asm now, but yeah "labour of love"... tsk tsk tsk...
- kejdjejxjejdj 16d ago
  > but yeah "labour of love"... tsk tsk tsk... What precludes this from being a labour of love, exactly?
  - jameshart 16d ago
    I think some people prefer their labours of love to involve the expenditure of actual labour.
    - kejdjejxjejdj 15d ago
      So planning, debugging, speccing, thinking, rethinking, designing, etc… do not count as labour? Please, do give me a list of what constitutes labour.
  - flohofwoe 15d ago
    When your manager gives you the task of building a complex product with a more or less vague "do what I mean" specification, and once a week shows up for 2 minutes to nudge you into a different direction, would you agree when the manager calls this his own "labour of love" when you did 99% of the actual work and thousands of micro-decisions along the way that your manager didn't even know had to be made?

progbits 16d ago

> Licence > > MIT, see LICENSE. Nothing here is derived from anyone else's code. Right... Except the whole thing being generated by a model derived from everyone's code. I'm not even sure I'm against licensing it as MIT but maybe stop with the ridiculous claims on top of that?