My experience with generative-AI has been that, at its very best, it is subtly wrong in ways that only an expert in the relevant subject would recognise.
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You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.
"planet-boiling roulette wheel" is the name of my upcoming experimental jazzcore EP
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We seem to have largely stopped innovating on trying to lower barriers to programming in favour of creating endless new frameworks and libraries for a vanishingly small number of near-identical languages. It is the mid-2020s and people are wringing their hands over Rust as if it was some inexplicable new thing rather than a C-derivative that incorporates decades old type theory. You know what I consider to be genuinely ground-breaking programming tools? VisiCalc, HyperCard and Scratch.
@jonathanhogg you're right, but also, it's more than that - today's tooling is worse for non-experts than the stuff that used to exist
because it's designed around corporate priorities, not individual ones. it's the factory looms problem.
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You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.
@jonathanhogg HyperCard was great.
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You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.
@jonathanhogg A quarter-century ago, we were developing a new version of JProbe, and as we got close to the day we had to send the golden master to the factory to manufacture CDs, we were short a settings configuration tool.
The team were told to skip the GUI editor and work on mission-critical features. Meanwhile, the program manager spent a weekend writing the editor in HyperCard, packaged with Metacard, a tool now known as LiveCode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode_(company)
We shipped it.
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@jonathanhogg you're right, but also, it's more than that - today's tooling is worse for non-experts than the stuff that used to exist
because it's designed around corporate priorities, not individual ones. it's the factory looms problem.
@ireneista @jonathanhogg this. It effects small businesses too. What works for a thousand or even 100 engineers doesn't work for 5.
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@jonathanhogg A quarter-century ago, we were developing a new version of JProbe, and as we got close to the day we had to send the golden master to the factory to manufacture CDs, we were short a settings configuration tool.
The team were told to skip the GUI editor and work on mission-critical features. Meanwhile, the program manager spent a weekend writing the editor in HyperCard, packaged with Metacard, a tool now known as LiveCode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode_(company)
We shipped it.
@jonathanhogg Afterward:
The program manager eventually left the company, and the team immediately rewrote the editor in Java/Swing. It took a summer, but now the company could brag that it used Java exclusively to write tools for Java.
I certainly never met a customer who cared whether the editor was written in Java. For that matter, nobody cared that the core analysis engine was written in C++.
Programming is a pop culture.
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You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.
On the gripping hand, if you're a trained programmer using vibe-coding because of a perceived increase in your productivity, or pressure from management to increase your productivity, I would refer you to my first post in this thread…
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You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.
@jonathanhogg HyperCard was *amazing* and I don't understand why there's nothing like it anymore. It was like building programs with Lego. Just snap things together, write your program in a very natural language, and do incredible things. It was so easy to double click on something and add a few lines of code. I remember also having fun with the flexibility of the language and constantly trying to see what different syntax I could get away with.
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You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.
@jonathanhogg this is my central response to the "AI makes software development accessible" argument.
Once upon a time anyone could program their personal computer using a book that came with it. We taught it to all the kids in my tiny town's elementary school. My shopkeep neighbor and our local mechanic wrote their own custom software with no CS background.
BASIC, Hypercard, personal computers, printed manuals > LLM's.
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My experience with generative-AI has been that, at its very best, it is subtly wrong in ways that only an expert in the relevant subject would recognise. So I don't worry about us creating super-intelligent AI, I worry about us allowing that expertise to atrophy through laziness and greed. I refuse to use LLMs not because I'm scared of how clever they are, but because I do not wish to become stupider.
@jonathanhogg this is nicely put.
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R AodeRelay shared this topic
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"planet-boiling roulette wheel" is the name of my upcoming experimental jazzcore EP
@pikesley @jonathanhogg looking forward to watching them at EMF later this year
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My experience with generative-AI has been that, at its very best, it is subtly wrong in ways that only an expert in the relevant subject would recognise. So I don't worry about us creating super-intelligent AI, I worry about us allowing that expertise to atrophy through laziness and greed. I refuse to use LLMs not because I'm scared of how clever they are, but because I do not wish to become stupider.
The big problem isn't people allowing AI into their work. They should fight back, you're exactly right.
The big problem is tech bros dont care, they BOUGHT ALL the Ram, they bought ALL the hard drives on the planet.
They intend -> no choice, there will be no allow or not allow, they are building an AI prison around earth.
They bought all the hard drives.
They bought all the ram
https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal
AI is prison.
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You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.
@jonathanhogg
Help us get the federated wiki there.It is more than a successor in spirit to HyperCard.
You would be surprised to learn about what #FedWiki does.
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@jarkman I can absolutely bend your ear at EMF, but conveniently I also recently gave a talk about it at Alpaca!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9khHD9sB7M&list=PLxqmZjMvoVzw773-Fo9ajkujFfOThuFOP&index=9
@jarkman @jonathanhogg Would love to have my ear bent about Flitter at EMF
. Are you planning to do your talk there? (I guess there’s that YouTube you posted, but I kind of like live performance 
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I will say one thing for generative AI: since these tools function by remixing/translating existing information, that vibe programming is so popular demonstrates a colossal failure on the part of our industry in not making this stuff easier. If a giant ball of statistics can mostly knock up a working app in minutes, this shows not that gen-AI is insanely clever, but that most of the work in making an app has always been stupid. We have gatekeeped programming behind vast walls of nonsense.
@jonathanhogg
Feel free to devise non-gatekept programming -
@jarkman @jonathanhogg Would love to have my ear bent about Flitter at EMF
. Are you planning to do your talk there? (I guess there’s that YouTube you posted, but I kind of like live performance ) -
@jarkman I can absolutely bend your ear at EMF, but conveniently I also recently gave a talk about it at Alpaca!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9khHD9sB7M&list=PLxqmZjMvoVzw773-Fo9ajkujFfOThuFOP&index=9
@jonathanhogg Thanks! I'll absorb that and then I can ask you better questions at EMF.
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R ActivityRelay shared this topic
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You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.
@jonathanhogg lazarus still exists, as a faint remanent of those times
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@jonathanhogg @jarkman Ack. Having now watched, I think your Alpaca talk is a pretty good intro. I see some resonance in your approach with OpenSCAD (different goals, of course).
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I will say one thing for generative AI: since these tools function by remixing/translating existing information, that vibe programming is so popular demonstrates a colossal failure on the part of our industry in not making this stuff easier. If a giant ball of statistics can mostly knock up a working app in minutes, this shows not that gen-AI is insanely clever, but that most of the work in making an app has always been stupid. We have gatekeeped programming behind vast walls of nonsense.
@jonathanhogg that's an interesting take. wouldn't that mean the same applies to art then?
Software development is in my opinion a creative task, and "AI" has shown that people will take shortcuts to get "results" faster just to get the recognition. I think the problem might be more in impatience and how our society doesn't allow things to take time.
