You’re hitting at the core problem. Experts have done the intensive research to create guides on the Internet which ChatGPT is trained on. For example, car repairs. ChatGPT can guide you through a lot of issues. But who is going to take the time to seriously investigate and research a brand new issue in a brand new model of car? An expert. Not an AI model. And as many delegate thinking to AI models, we end up with fewer experts.

ChatGPT is not an expert, it’s just statistically likely to regurgitate something very similar to what existing experts (or maybe amateurs or frauds!) have already said online. It’s not creating any information for itself.

So if we end up with fewer people willing to do the hard work of creating the underlying expert information these AI models are so generously trained on, we see stagnation in progress.

So encouraging people to write books and do real investigative research, digging for the truth, is even more important than ever. A chatbot’s value proposition is repackaging that truth in a way you can understand, surfacing it when you might not have found it. Without people researching the truth, that already fragile foundation crumbles.

> You’re hitting at the core problem.

Are you writing in the style of an LLM as a gag, or just interacting with LLM's so much it's become engrained?

It depends on the shot a lot too. Good DPs will use a panning speed that looks much smoother at 24fps.

Problem is, you’ll have to find a high bitrate version. Whatever they streamed on HBO the day of release was really shitty bitrate which crushes detail in detail-starved scenes like these

I tried a load of different versions including blu-ray rips IIRC, and it was all just as bad.

When I last rewatched it (early pandemic), as far as I could tell at the time there was no HDR version available, which I assume would fix it by being able to represent more variation in the darker colours.

I might hunt one down at some point as it does exist now. Though it still wouldn’t make season 8 ‘good’ !!

You’re right, but at the same time, 99% of software people need has already been done in some form. This gets back to the article on “perfect software” [1] posted last week. This bookshelf is perfect for the guy who wrote it and there isn’t anything exactly like it out there. The common tools on the App Store (goodreads) don’t fit his needs. But he was able to create a piece of “perfect software” that exactly meets his own goals and his own design preferences. And it was very easy to accomplish with LLMs, just by putting together pieces of things that have been done before.

This is still pretty great!

1: https://outofdesk.netlify.app/blog/perfect-software

Yes, that's an excellent framing of where we're at and the role that LLM generated software is excelling in. Custom software has been out of reach for many people who would benefit from it due to requiring either a lot of money to pay someone to build it or a lot of time to learn how to build it yourself and execute on that process. Right now you can essentially use services like Claude as a custom software "app store", although I'd really call it a service, where you can say "I'd like an app that does X" and depending on the scope you can get that app as a Claude Artifact in a few minutes or, if you're familiar with software development and build/deployment processes, in a few hours to days as a more traditional software artifact which you can host somewhere or install locally. Google is working hard to make this even more achievable for non-developers with Google AI Studio https://aistudio.google.com/ and Firebase Studio https://firebase.studio/

Exactly. LLMs aren't taking the jobs of developers - unless they're selling some micro-SaaS stuff that anyone with enough domain knowledge can duplicate with a Claude subscription over a weekend.

Like the DVD catalogue software I was using[0] became subscription based, and I'm not paying 50€/year for that.

Just rewrote the bits that I need this afternoon with Claude. It definitely doesn't have the same features as the CLZ Movies app had, but it has all the ones I need specifically (adding movies easily, quickly seeing if I already own a movie).

And the same will happen to more and more SaaS style things unless they offer something unique a self-made and self-hosted one can't provide.

[0] https://clz.com/movies

Subsidized transit has legitimately nothing to do with distorted housing costs or labor markets. Housing market is simply supply vs demand. Housing markets like Seattle are incredibly expensive because so many people want to move there, partly because local middle class wages are fairly high.

If you’re saying subsidized transit increases local quality of life, leading to higher demand, sure. But the cost itself has nothing to do with housing prices. Property taxes do not make mortgages more expensive. (Wouldn’t it have the opposite effect, high property taxes making houses harder to afford and therefore decreasing demand?)

Or is it that subsidized road systems don’t work? The pure miles of a system are completely irrelevant. Transit systems are meant for high density areas, costing more but covering less ground. The cost of tunneling under a mile Seattle for a road is absolutely more expensive than building a mile of highway in the middle of nowhere.

What the fuck are you on about re:democracy? “Thoughtless social experiments” are pretty far from the truth there. Democracy gets ruined by political parties unwilling to hold their own members accountable and by allowing corporations to exert more political power than human beings.

Small correction: there is unsubsidized transit, just not unsubsidized public transit. Seattle has Amazon, Microsoft, snd Google buses judt like the Bay Area does. My wife takes the Amazon bus a lot even though the public transit route would work just as well (for safety/hygiene reasons).

That’s really not the point of the post!

The author is saying that “perfect software” is like a perfect cup of coffee. It’s highly subjective to the end user. The perfect software for me perfectly matches how I want to interact with software. It has options just for me. It’s fine tuned to my taste and my workflows, showing me information I want to see. You might never find a tool that’s perfect for you because someone else wrote it for their own taste.

LLMs come in because it wildly increases the amount of stuff you can play around with on a personal level. It means someone finally has time to put together the perfect workflow and advanced tools. I personally have about 0 time outside of work that I can invest in that, so I totally buy the idea that LLMs can really give people the space to develop personal tools and workflows that work perfectly for them. The barrier to entry and experimentation is incredibly low, and since it’s just for you, you don’t need to worry about scale and operations and all the hard stuff.

There is still plenty of room for someone to do it by hand, but I certainly don’t have time to do that. So I’ll never find perfect software for some of my workflows unless I get an assist from LLMs.

I agree with you about learning and achievement and fun — but that’s completely unrelated to the topic!

Thanks for this. This is exactly the spirit in which I wrote it.

You hit on the key constraint: time. The point isn't that the use of LLMs specifically provides agency, but that it lowers the barrier, allowing us to build things that bring it. "Perfect software" is perfect not just because of what they do, but because of what it lacks (fluff, tracking, features we don't need).

Because manually configuring wireguard tunnels on random devices is a simple task for most people lol. Unifi’s whole stack is all about making powerful tools easier to use for people who don’t want to fuck around with networking.

Agreed. I use Tailscale (which the gl.inet devices support, because they're basically a pretty front end for OpenWRT, and it supports Tailscale) for my stuff, because I can do it and it's not a real pain to do, but you do have to know a bit at least about networking. This thing looks extremely promising for the "I know this should be possible and I want to do it but have no idea how" level of knowledge as well as the "I want to spend as little time as possible on configuring things" people.

But you don't need to configure wireguard on the individual devices just on the openwrt router. That's one device and you can keep that on permanently.

Except that sometimes you can’t. I don’t know if the Unifi router checks for this, but I’ve run into more than one network where the VPN conflicted with either the captive portal or the wireless network itself (and at least one in the DFW Admiral’s club that had draconian blocking)

Yeah, GHA has a massive plugin ecosystem. A common pattern is using an “action” from a plugin as one CI step/job. So these are dependencies that get resolved at runtime when GHA puts together your workload.

Other CI platforms have plugins, but the “plugins” in GitHub really get used as the core primitive of the system, which is part of what makes it so simple & easy to use… for really basic workflows. You just hook up a couple actions like this and you’re good to go, no shell scripting required. (Though you can totally do that too.)

I mean at the end of the day, it’s a big part of the value proposition, even if I prefer a much more bare metal approach. GHA is really not great at massive CI workloads.

Yeah, it’s exceptionally easy to set this up and we have the same thing. Except the team hasn’t had time to fine tune it, and it shows.