Comment by NewsaHackO

Comment by NewsaHackO 2 days ago

2 replies

I don't think you fully understood the purpose of the project. He wanted an end product (the bookshelf app) that he had been putting off due to the time commitment. He did not say he wanted to learn about how to program in general, nor did he even say he liked programming. People care about results and the end product. If you like to program as a hobby, LLMs in no way stop you from doing this. At the end of the day, people with your viewpoint fall short of convincing people against using AI because you are being extremely condescending to the desires of regular people. Also, it is quite ironic that you attempted to make a point about him not reading all 500 books on his bookshelf, yet you don't seem to have read (or understood) the opening section of the post.

ear7h 2 days ago

I'm not trying to _convince_ a stranger on the internet whether to use AI for their vibe shelf hobby project; I'm engaging with a project being presented by it's creator. Interesting that you think continuing to use AI is some enormous own against my presumed attempt at persuasion. Sounds like maybe you're the one needing validation for your viewpoint. It's clearly easy to achieve such validation given the evidence in this comment section so, I'm not sure why you're seeking it from me.

As for the main concern in your comment, I did in fact read the blog post; see how I quoted multiple parts, verbatim ("word for word")?. I now understand this audience may not be entirely familiar with literature or reading beyond basic instructions from their preferred datacenter or advertising company, but generally the beginning of a piece of writing (the "introduction") serves as the premise while the end (the "conclusion") describes the abstract ideas a reader should take away from the entire piece. I'll even let you in on a little secret: the word "conclusion" is synonymous with "a judgement following logical steps". As I mentioned in my original comment there is also a middle section which can often be more important or meaningful (to both characters and readers) than the introduction or conclusion. Howver, in this piece of writing it amounted to "I didn't know how to do something so I asked AI and when it didn't do the right thing I asked it again" which isn't a very engaging story (there's a similar famous premise about an "oracle" that can respond to three "queries", however the entertainment relies on this limitation). Anyways, the badic premise seems to be well received already and lacking any interesting description of the process, I chose to engage with the conclusion. The question of taste.

The author believes, or rather instructed an LLM to generate an article from the perspective in which someone belives, generative AI can enable the good taste of someone in prototype hell to come to fruition. But in my original comment I'm making the point that creating something of good taste is inextricably linked to engagement with the medium. But the author shows a willful lack of engagement, with their medium whether that be software or a book shelf.

If you'd like to engage with my original comment in good faith, here are some questions: * do you really think this project constitutes good taste? for software? for book shelves? * can someone with an apathy for a craft as extreme the author have good taste? * might this even be considered bad taste given the technological sensibilities of this forum? (disdain for js bloat, foss, "elegant solutions")

  • NewsaHackO 15 hours ago

    Since you said you read the post, explain this to me:

    >To me, this project perfectly encapsulates the uselessness of AI, small projects like this are good learning or relearning experience and by outsourcing your thinking to AI you deprive yourself of any learning, ownership, or the self fulfillment that comes with it. Unless, of course, you think engaging in "tedious" activities with things you enjoy have zero value, and if getting lost in the weeds isn't the whole point.

    In the context of his first paragraph

    >I own more books than I can read. Not in a charming, aspirational way, but in the practical sense that at some point I stopped knowing what I owned. Somewhere around 500 books, memory stopped being a reliable catalog.[...] For years, I told myself I would fix this. Nothing elaborate, nothing worthy of a startup idea. A spreadsheet would have been enough. I never did it, not because it was hard, but because it was tedious.

    Wouldn't your statement be completely moot because he plainly said the purpose of the project was to create a system to handle his books, and the only reason he hasn't done it yet was because it was tedious? (Hint: if you need the paragraph or thge rest of his article to be broken down for you more, I suggest asking ChatGPT to give a summary for you).