quixote84

Of course it sounds out of touch. I didn't say it, or anything like it. Just like the other commenter, you seem to have stopped after the first sentence.

20 years of IT experience from a support perspective does qualify me to put anybody in the programming space on notice. The tools might not be as good as a talented and well trained dev, but they're already better than a lazy dev. The output I get from Claude Code takes effort to get running. It just takes less of it than the output from my outsourced offshore MSP.

It's an Isaac Asimov story. An excellent one I cite frequently with regards to human ability to cope with increasing rate of change.

I've never been able to program in anything more complex than BASIC and command line batch files, but I'm able to get useful output from Claude.

I'm an IT Infrastructure Manager by trade, and I got there through 20 years of supporting everything from desktop to datacenter including weird use cases like controlling systems in a research lab. On top of that, I've gotten under the hood of software in the form of running game servers in my spare time.

What you need to get good programs out of AI boils down to 3 things:

The ability to teach an entity whose mistakes resemble those of a gifted child where it went wrong a step or ten back from where it's currently looking.
The ability to provide useful beta test / debug output regarding programs which aren't behaving as expected. This does include looking at an error log and having some idea what that error means.
Comfort using (either executing or compiling depending on the language) source code associated with the language you're doing things in. This might be as simple as "How do I run a Powershell script or verify that I meet the version and module requirements for the script in question?", or it might be as complicated as building an executable in Visual Studio. Either way whatever the pipeline is from source to execution, it must be a pipeline you're comfortable working with. If you're doing things anywhere outside the IT administration space, it's reasonable to be looking at Python as the best first path rather than Powershell. Personally, I must go where supported first party modules exist for the types of work I'm developing around. In IT Administration, that's Powershell.

I've made tools which automate and improve my entire department's approach to user data, device data, application inventory, patch management, vulnerability management, and these are changes I started making with a free product three months ago, and two months back I switched to the paid version.

Programming is sort of like conversation in an alien language. For that reason, if you can give precise instructions sometimes you really can pull something new into existence using LLM coding. It's the same reason that you could say words which have never been said in that specific order before, and have an LLM translate them to Portuguese.

I always used to talk about how everything in a computer was math, and that what interested me more than quantum computing would be a machine which starts performing the same sorts of operations on words or concepts that computers of that day ('90s and '00s when "quantum" was being slapped on everything to mean "fast" or "powerful") were doing on math. I said that the best indicator when linguistic computing arrives would be that without ever learning to program, I'd start being able to program. I was looking at "Dragon Naturally Speaking" when I had this idea. It was one of the earliest effective speech to text programs. I stopped learning to program immediately and focused exclusively on learning operations from that point forward.

I've been testing the code generation abilities of LLMs for about three years. Within the last six months I feel like I'm starting to see evidence that the associations being made internally by LLMs are complex enough to begin considering them the fulfillment of my childhood dream of a "word computer".

All the shitty stuff about environment and theft of art is all there too, which sucks, but more because our economic model sucks than because LLMs either do or do not suck. If we had a framework for meeting everybody's basic needs, this software in its current state has the potential to turn everyone with a passion for grammatical and technical precision into a concept based developer practically overnight.

Never forget the primary lesson of Vietnam.

They draft, you frag.

When Weird Al tries that, somehow he circles right back around to "right".

Yeah solving this problem is going to take somewhere between a hundred and a thousand Luigis...

Everyone who perceived the Harris pivot as "playing to lose" has ideas about it. We're over-represented on Lemmy as compared with the voting public. The Republican party has been sufficiently horrifying for sufficiently long, that there is an entire generation of voters who "lean left", but have no idea where to even begin actually holding their party accountable for things.

In 1984 Jesse Jackson had his Rainbow Coalition, but they gave us Walter Mondale. The same thing happened with Bernie in both 2016 and 2020. In the USA there is a capitalist part and a fash party, and no room is permitted on the stage for anything other than tightly controlled powerless opposition.

That's the job I need. I've spent my whole live trying to be Data from Star Trek. I'm ready to try to mentor and befriend a computer.

This Run the Jewels is

Murder, mayhem, melodic music.

It was here before we got here, and good and bad are both words of human origin.

I accept your take fully. Here's why I still love it:

I have docks in any location where I plan to work for an extended period of time. "The smallest device which can run x86/x64 code" is what I look for in the handheld device I carry around with me that isn't company issued.

You're right about one thing, though. It and the surface go 2 before it are items I targeted when I saw the use that others were getting out of their iOS and Android tablets. I wanted a device that still gives me access to calibre for e-book sorting and the time waste-y low resource usage portion of my steam library even if I'm on an airplane. The pocket, as well as a charger, a slim bluetooth mouse, and an e-reader all fit in a pouch not much larger than a case for a study bible. I can pull that out of my travel backpack and tuck it in the pocket of the seat in front of me, then I don't have to fight with any of my carry-on luggage during the flight. I take a bluetooth controller or two with me if I'm going to be somewhere for more than a few days, and then when I'm back at the hotel I can hook this same tiny device up to the TV in the hotel room and play emulated games or resource friendly steam games.

I've been using laptops my whole life, and it seems like whenever I'm using the built in display, it's already a poor environment for productivity. Portability gets my attention in its stead.

gpd pocket is the best field work laptop series I know of right now.

The hallucinations are my favorite part of making these things. I spend maybe 5 minutes tweaking the prompt, and I stop when it hits that sweet spot of "This tells my instincts that I should not believe what I'm seeing". Pair it with a lie, and it's an LLM image recognition training tool in addition to being a meme.

Every now and again they're completely blatant about mocking that portion of their base.

Based on what I got to see regarding the development of Helix vs Dome in "Twitch Plays Pokemon Red", I've got a hunch that those 40 years in the desert a few thousand years ago were nothing to write home about either.

Mythology spews forth from wherever. It's arbitrary and yet still meaningful.

If there's a spiritual practice out there which is genuinely capable of improving one's health, it's going to look nothing like either hustle culture or straight up health denial. In 2009 I weighed around 350 as well. I'm down to around 240 now with more yet to go.

Sugar was my entire problem.

Yeah... I lit my hair on fire once checking to see if I could still hear butane coming out of a "broken" lighter. The room it happened in smelled funny for the rest of the day.

I don't believe that it's mine to dole out.

I was included in the e-mail conversation where they were passing bits of site code and data around as part of the attempt to rebuild it, and was encouraged to make more LLM images with the data. At no point was I ever told "This is yours now to do with what you wish". What I was told is that "the idea of applying AI generated images, hallucinations and all, into posts about lies is brilliant". They're from the UK, so in this context I believe "brilliant" means "kinda cool".

Whatever the case, there's a vast gulf between "We like what you're doing", and "please give 20 years of our effort to everyone who asks for it". I will pass along to the guys that the first time I posted a lie anywhere other than my old faceplant page multiple parties immediately expressed interest in seeing the site ride again.

I know some folks don't like to hear this, but it isn't as easy as just dumping any random text you want into an LLM and getting a viable image you're happy with on the other side. Each time I make an image for a DWOL lie, it involves six to eighteen base images with progressively tweaked prompts until I'm satisfied with the output. Dumping the lie straight into an LLM and rolling with whatever output I receive ends up looking more like the image attached to this comment.

As I indicated in another comment, the owners of Dave's Web of Lies endorse the lies being leveraged in this fashion.

quixote84

@ quixote84 @midwest.social

Posts

6
Comments

22
Joined

2 yr. ago

quixote84

I just tried vibe coding with Claude

Permanently Deleted

I just tried vibe coding with Claude

Hegseth Flies in Every General to Hear Him Rant About Beards

Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws

Musk and Hannity talk right over Trump in awkward Fox News interview

I’m a Federal Worker. You Have No Idea the Irreversible Damage Elon Musk Is Doing.

The GPT Era Is Already Ending

I mean...violence is bad.

I mean...violence is bad.

All the other brands went along

All the other brands went along

More memories of "Dave's Web of Lies". I prefer Thanksgiving to Christmas. Good food, good company, no gift related stress.

Another line from "Dave's Web of Lies". Surprisingly enough, the least alarming thing I've heard about 2025 so far...

Another line from "Dave's Web of Lies". Surprisingly enough, the least alarming thing I've heard about 2025 so far...

Permanently Deleted

A Bonus memory from "Dave's Web of Lies", in honor of spooky meme day.

another day, another tribute to "Dave's Web of Lies". This lie became my own personal mythology from like 2004-2009...

another day, another tribute to "Dave's Web of Lies". This lie became my own personal mythology from like 2004-2009...

Today's entry remembering "Dave's Web of Lies"

Today's entry remembering "Dave's Web of Lies"

Today's entry remembering "Dave's Web of Lies"

Do any of you remember the old website "Dave's Web of Lies"?

Do any of you remember the old website "Dave's Web of Lies"?

Do any of you remember the old website "Dave's Web of Lies"?

Do any of you remember the old website "Dave's Web of Lies"?