> Control, sensory feedback, intention, intimacy, continuous direction, expertise etc are all missing from LLM use. LLMs are not wielded. LLMs are automation.
Cameras do indeed have sensory feedback, intention, intimacy, contentious direction, expertise, etc. So TFA would indeed describe a camera as a tool, not as automation.
Note also that TFA is not romanticizing effort, rather it is putting value to expertise:
> The continuous application of technique and energy, and sensory feedback, are essential to the buildup of expertise.
Expertise has no inherint value. What you do with that expertise does. I can be an expert in playing monopoly, does that make it valuable? no. I can be an expert in virology but instead I watch tv and drink beer all day. It's a coorelation causation trap.
The correlation is not a 1:1 relationship (few things in nature are).
Yes there exists a type of expertise where the value is not realized by whichever arbitrary metric you use to assign value. However having expertise is more likely to result in value added compared to not having said expertise.
For example, I am learning the guitar, I am not an expert, but the more I practice the more I approach expertise, then I can play more songs, I can play them better, resulting in me and those around me having more fun = value added.
"You have traded working with the world to working for a capricious robot."
This is what i'm a critic of not having more fun. This reads to me that some people are charlatans and i'm an expert. That type of sentiment is prevalent in all sorts of creative persuits. Aside from it being factually wrong, it's just different not worse or better.
What exactly are you a critic of? Why is this statement factually wrong (and why is the fact that it is wrong just an aside)? Why do you say trading your expertise for automation is neither better nor worse. For me—if I care about the craft—it is obviously worse.
I could have simply turned on the radio if I wanted to hear the guitar played, instead I spend an hour or more a day to acquire the necessary skills to satisfy. The latter is obviously better.
Thats great you care about the craft. There are many kinds of craft, but just because you do your craft in a certain way doesn't make others way invalid. The latter is not obviously better, better depends on your definition of value. The definition i'm reading from the article is whether it provides value to world or to you personally and I'm just saying who cares how that is accomplished. Defining how a craft "should be done" is the trap i'm pointing out. If the making is the important part to you aka the process and the journey, thats awesome and I agree that many wonderful things are created in the way you practice guitar with your hand eye coordination, auditory processing, etc... however I find it counterproductive to label ways of creating more or less valuable, they are just different. If I was to program a machine to play the guitar for me it might be different but not inherently better or worse just because you practice every day with your hands and I program a robot to do it. Maybe I have cerebral palsy and I can't play guitar the way you do, does that make my art lesser? It just makes my constraints different and thats at the core of what i'm getting at.
Which is why it ultimately helped art because it removed the incentive to just make paintings as realistic as possible because there was a tool that did that boring task better.
I don't know if "helped art" is a well-defined concept because it depends on a notion of "better" or "worse" art which is itself famously poorly defined.
If all you wanted was a reasonable facsimile of a family member, then photography made attaining that object dramatically cheaper. Prior to photography, almost all of images of people are of fabulously wealthy and powerful people because they were the only ones who could afford a skilled painter making their portrait. After photography, most people could afford a daguerreotype.
The impact on fine art is much more complex. I think probably all you can say definitively is that the timeline where photography exists produces very different fine art paintings because the incentive structure and the implications are different in a world with photos. But better or worse? Impossible to say.
So much so we call them photographers instead of (vibe) painters.
Yet vibe coders and people that delegate the creation of software through English prose to an LLM are still called software engineers or programmers. That is my major problem with the whole thing.
I think the distinction is meaningless to the vast majority of the population. People who use a web service don't care if it was vibe coded or hand coded as long as it does the job.
I think comes from a natural feeling of ownership over your profession. There's nothing wrong with that feeling that the title of engineer must be earned but in reality titles means nothing, what you do with it is whats important.
Well, not a good analogy really, most of the old masters used cameras regularly, and there's a history of camera use for painting that extends from the northern renaissance to modernity.
My point is the line between tool and automation is a pointless line to draw that is about effort not output. This same logic was used to critique photography as an art form.
Do DJ's make music? Why don't they play all the instruments themselves and become "experts"?
Judge the product, not how difficult or easy it was to create it.
One can argue that the instrument DJs master are the discs and the mixer. DJs have to know a lot of songs, know which keys they are in, know which tempo it is in, know the range of tempos two songs sound good together, know which keys sound good together when switching songs, etc. etc. Good DJs are indeed experts. If they wanted automation they would just pick a Now record or a Spotify playlist and play it through.
Is it not possible the spotify playlist is better than the DJ set? I agree DJ's are experts! In fact thats my point! They are just as much experts as musicians playing instruments just different kinds of experts. That being said just because work was done to it does not make it good.
Anyway this is getting a little too involved for a HN thread and it's unlikely I'll move your position but I appreciate the dialog.
Why would you be embarrassed? when bootstrap came out it took like 10 years for websites to start looking "not bootstrap". These people are just looking for something to complain, maybe GP is a designer and it's running out of work to do... As long as the product is solid...
Not really. Cellebrite isn't magic. If you have an up to date OS and a strong password not pin, encryption functions as it should. The best thing to do is simply have a travel phone.
Once again its not as simple as oh its easy now. It's highly dependent on how much time has passed, who you are, what your worried about... etc... making it out like everyone is on the same plane makes the threat assessment worthless.
Thats not at all accurate. When you say "resisting" you are glossing over really important distinctions. The lastest versions of iOS are perfectly capable of being locked down in a such a way that they are not able to be penetrated by Cellebrite.
The info extracted is the nuance your missing here. Cellebrite doesnt break encryption, it brute forces weak PINs and passwords and collects metadata thats outside of the protected volume.
Your online activity likely exposes much much more about you than the data extracted by Cellebrite. These distinctions matter as its really easy to misunderstand and sensitionalize their tools.
iOS: Cellebrite supports access to the latest iPhone models and iOS versions, including both after-first-unlock (AFU) and before-first-unlock (BFU) states. Recent updates have introduced new AFU access methods for previously unsupported iOS device configurations, expanding the range of devices that can be accessed without requiring a prior unlock event.
Android: The latest releases restored and expanded full file system (FFS) extraction across a broad range of newer Android models, which is an area where the competitive landscape had seen fluctuation. Coverage now spans Samsung, Google Pixel and other major Android manufacturers at their current OS versions.
"Access" is not what you think it means. This is marketing hype directly from their site. I have first hand experience using their extractors and its not as robust as they make it sound. They extract metadata outside of the encrypted volumes. It all depends on what your worried about.
Actual hardware 0-days are highly coveted, extremely expensive, military classified tools that TSA does not have access too and never will.
Exactly. All libraries are worthy of being supported and grown. I make no distinction between a physical dead-tree library and a digital library.
The only reason we even have dead-tree libraries at all is because 100 years ago, that was what John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie put forth to whitewash their horrible capitalist behaviors across the USA. And because it was done by those generations' billionaires, public libraries because acceptable.
If public libraries were created in the last 20 years, they would have been banned and felony copyright charges would have been levied. In fact, thats exactly what happened WHEN people tried to create free digital libraries.
> If public libraries were created in the last 20 years, they would have been banned and felony copyright charges would have been levied. In fact, thats exactly what happened WHEN people tried to create free digital libraries.
I wonder why nobody created a Netflix-like subscription for digital books
The problem with Libby is finding a local library that has a good selection. Mine does not, and my state does not have the feature of being able to get a library card from any library in the state. I would have to buy a membership to a non-local library, which can be surprisingly difficult to do if what you care about is a large selection of ebooks.
Amazon maybe? Kindle Unlimited. In some ways Audible with audiobooks. Which actually has lot of entrants though they tend to limit listening time on large part of their portfolio.
Because you have to pay a ton more for a lot of digital copies of books if you're doing any kind of lending and you're competing with existing libraries. So you both have higher costs (e.g. you have to pay more for a digital file that may have DRM, be required to self destruct after a certain number of uses, doesn't allow multiple lends at a time, etc.) and your prospective consumers have a free option so convincing them to pay is going to be difficult.
Netflix has a larger market base (far more people watch TV and movies than read books, particularly at a level high enough to justify a subscription) and a market base that is far less likely to already be aware of the free alternative (most serious readers of the sort that go through that amount of books are already aware of their local libraries, whereas serious movie/TV watchers are less likely to be so).
Additionally, modern Netflix is a streaming company, and even DVD Netflix was sending the materials directly to your house, which is a differentiator versus the library, whose materials need to be picked up. There's a convenience factor as an incentive to pay. Library streaming exists, but it's awful - very limited library and very limited watches - versus Netflix where once you sub you can watch as much as you want.
The reason I don't subscribe is it takes me a lot longer to finish a book/audiobook than a movie. I just get them from the library/Libby - even if it's a 4 month wait, there are plenty of available books to read while I wait.
There was already one that existed in the web 2.0 era. Founded in 2012, raised a $3M seed from Founders Fund and a $14M A. Completely failed though and was acquihired by Google to have the founders lead Google Play Books.
Amazon now has Kindle Unlimited but I think it's mostly romance slop and self-published books. Seems like publishing rightsholders were just too inflexible to let the business model take off.
I consider libraries, public schools and maybe even public fire departments in the list of things that could never be proposed today if they didn't already exist.
Reminds me of Baudelaire:
"the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies"
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