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Comparison is the thief of joy. I remember when I first got a 1080p display, comparing it to my previous 480p one the difference was amazing, but before I got the 1080p display I had no problem with my old one.

All that to say.. what's best, cheap, no wires, no headaches and happy or expensive, wires, having to download music and make a library etc and always looking for the next high, the next minor improvement?

One of the happiest days of my life was when I listened to my music on a 10$ mp3 player with 2$ earphones after 3 months of not listening to it.

So yeah, you may be right, even though I've tried 3000$ open-ear audiophile headphones, with an amazing amplifier, listening on tidal and it didn't blow me away but even if it did, I'd be stupid to even try, then I'd know what I'm missing and craving a 5000$ setup when I'm already happy with the 1 inch box I can easily carry wherever I go.


> what's best, cheap, no wires, no headaches and happy or expensive, wires

You can get great sounding wired iems for very little money, while wireless earbuds are usually pretty pricey for anything not crummy. Cables are indeed annoying, but so is your earbuds being dead because you forgot to charge them. The battery problem gets worse too as they age. If you want reliable, cheap, good sounding music it is pretty hard to beat chi-fi iems.


In gemini I have the following personal context:

- Do not stroke my ego

- I never want to be complimented

And it disagrees with me a lot, granted this is in the webchat which I don't use for programming but for general usage seems to work, it isn't sycophantic


I don't have those system prompts, but gemini pushes back on its own quite a bit. It'll tell me when I wrong, or when there are better options to consider. They won't be exhaustive, but good enough for 95% of my queries, so it's also my go-to web chat.

Haven't used chrome in years, Firefox has served me well

Not only requires you to log in, asks you your username once you do log in, which means for me I can't log in because I had a random username and there is no email from them where it is mentioned


friends


the better AI becomes the more non-programmers will be able to use it to build apps, and because they don't know how to program themselves they will use FAR more tokens than us to achieve the same thing. As long as AI is good enough for them to build whatever they desire there will be a lot of demand imo.


I’ve been thinking about this question for months: with access to good LLMs and unlimited tokens, how many non developers will end up making software?

I’m sure some people will. But most people I know don’t think about software like that. They don’t know what use cases are, or ask themselves how their life could be simpler with different software. LLMs only make software if you prompt them. Most people don’t frame the problems they have in life as “I’m missing software to solve problem X”.

I think most people will never prompt LLMs to write software. Just like I don’t have a 3d printer, because I don’t think about how problems in my life could be solved with little plastic doodads.


My analogy is: almost everyone can to go Home Depot and grab all the plumbing supplies they need to do a lot of jobs. And people do - Home Depot does great business.

But plumbers are still in very high demand, and charge really high prices for what is in many cases really simple stuff.

For a lot of folks, the idea just never enters their mind that they can solve simple problems themselves. Most people don’t want to spend the time, undertake the learning, have the possibility of doing it wrong, risk their property, insurance/code issues, etc. And this is an absolutely reasonable position to take! We can’t all be specialists at all things.

All that to say: people will long think that software is something that is made by someone of a special role. Even long after that’s not necessary anymore. That’s not great job security, but it’s what I’m going with for now!


I've met at least one person that has gone pretty far on a somewhat complicated project who has literally zero programming experience. he did it for fun.

I also know someone that thought about making a SaaS for his specific niche he works in, he asked me if I ever used Claude then told me his project.

Yes, most people will never do it because they're not the type of people that are self-motivated and courageous enough to dive into something with confidence to see how it goes.

But probably, as more people build stuff and it makes headlines that X person built Y service and is making Z$$ per month and he can't even write a hello world to save his life, a lot more people will try it out.


> Yes, most people will never do it because they're not the type of people that are self-motivated and courageous enough to dive into something with confidence to see how it goes

Or they’re just not interested. Just look around to see how many things that people are doing that you have no interest into. That’s the same disinterest people have towards programming and sys admin.


> X person built Y service and is making Z$$

If person X didn’t contribute anything but a prompt, he probably wont be able to charge much.


A non programmer can iterate on an idea just as well as a programmer.

First guy I mentioned spent a month tinkering, testing what he could, getting a basic high level understanding of the problem space to understand why his prompts didn't work, etc


Ask the AI


Depends on the context.

In this case he is right : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49239999


Your quote shows someone BELOW the line being able to do something. That could not be considered amplification because multiplying a skill of 0 doesn’t get you anywhere. But if you want to see it that way, it doesn’t bother me.

The Tao reference is someone far ABOVE the line getting excellent results from the LLM.

So in this case the Tao example refutes the GGP claim.


My skill consisted in knowing what's possible and a testing strategy (compare frame by frame to the other filter until broken filter got fixed).


> it ends if we decide not to keep telling it

That's wishful thinking, what are you saying, labs/people across the world will selflessly decide they're not going to pursue further research if we on HN stop saying it?


> Trust me when I say that in the hands of someone who doesn't have your experience, the LLMs would not be getting the results you get.

https://code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/issues/23049

So there's this 11 year old issue in a forgotten ffmpeg plugin and I fixed it with deepseek by putting it into a self-testing loop. Probably would have taken me a few weeks to even understand the initial code to begin with. I haven't done C work in a long ass time and have zero knowledge of even what sub pixel sampling means.

With DS4 took me a few days and a couple of dollars. And by few days I mean I checked on it a few minutes every half hour or so a few times.

I don't understand the code it wrote but it's been in production for a while now and no issues so it's good. Ended up speeding up our video processing pipeline by 20-30%.


So while I do agree that it is cool you were able to do this, I‘ll say:

Sending in the patches but refusing to take responsibility for them is a surefire way to contribute to maintainer burnout. Please don’t do this. Either commit to fixing something and driving the PR to merge, or abstain from it entirely.

The bottleneck isn’t the speed of coding, and what you’re doing here is actively worsening the situation.


idk if it's really worsening, someone who has the same issue can apply the patch. I understand why they rejected it but also I'm not willing to learn everything that DS4 did there since I don't plan on working on ffmpeg filters and the knowledge is pretty much useless to me outside this patch. Too much time commitment for.. fixing a filter no one really cared about for 11 years.

But you can see how the parent's comment doesn't really hold, I was able to achieve this while not knowing anything other than what I need fixed and making the LLM test itself towards that goal.


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