• 0 Posts
  • 5 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
Cake day: January 27th, 2026
  • Tim@lemmy.snowgoons.rotoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•I built a local AI movie recommender for Radarr using OllamaEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    I mean, I haven’t argued with an AI for 2.5 hours straight, because I know how to use them. And I don’t expect them to think for me, because I know they’re not capable of it.

    I was writing assembly language for embedded controllers where the memory is measured in bytes not megabytes, professionally, before half of you were born. I’ve developed preemptive multitasking OSes for 8 but microcontrollers, by hand, for money. These skills ceased to be particularly useful decades ago, but I didn’t sit down and sulk because optimising compilers and ludicrously cheap memory had ended my career, I moved with the times.

    Practically everyone who calls themselves a “programmer” has never had the training wheels taken off since the invention of managed runtimes, you don’t now get to complain about what is or is not proper programming. The actual software engineers, who understood that the code was always just a side effect of their real job - understanding and solving problems - just have a new, and really cool, tool to learn how to use. The ones who aren’t up to it will spend 2.5hrs arguing with their AI, and then go back to coding for a hobby. And that’s fine - but if you refuse to learn AI as a tool, you no longer have a career in this industry. Any more than I would’ve if I had refused to accept that memory is basically free now and compilers can write assembly better than me.

  • Tim@lemmy.snowgoons.rotoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•I built a local AI movie recommender for Radarr using OllamaEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    Warning, anecdote:

    I was unexpectedly stuck in Asia for the last month (because of the impact of the war), turning an in-person dev conference I was organising into an “in-person except for me” one at a few days notice.

    I needed a simple countdown timer/agenda display I could mix into the video with OBS; a simple requirement, so I tried a few from the standard package repos (apt, snap store, that kind of thing.)

    None of them worked the way I wanted or at all - one of them written in Python installed about 100 goddamned dependencies (because, Python,) and then crashed because, well, Python.

    So I gave up and asked my local hosted LLM model to write it for me in Rust. In less than 10 minutes I had exactly what I wanted, in a few hundred lines of Rust. And yeah, I did tidy it up and publish it to the snap store as well, because it’s neat and it might help someone else.

    Which is more secure? The couple of hundred lines of Rust written by my LLM, or the Python or node.js app that the developer pinky-promises was written entirely by human hand, and which downloads half the Internet as dependencies that I absolutely am not going to spend time auditing just to display a goddamned countdown clock in a terminal window?

    The solution to managing untrusted code isn’t asking developers for self-declared purity test results. It’s sandboxing, containers, static analysis… All the stuff that you are doing already with all the code/apps you download if you’re actually concerned. You are doing those things, right?

  • Tim@lemmy.snowgoons.rotoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•I built a local AI movie recommender for Radarr using OllamaEnglish
    21·
    2 days ago

    Honestly, any developer that isn’t using an LLM as an assistant these days is an idiot and should be fired/shunned as such; it’s got all the rational sense of “I refuse to use compilers and I hand-write my assembly code in vi.”

    (And I speak as someone who has a .emacs file that’s older than most programmers alive today and finally admitted I should stop using csh as my default shell this year.)

    Here’s the disclosure you need: all projects you see have involved AI somewhere, whether the developers like to admit it or not. End of. The genie is out of the bottle, and it’s not going back in. Railing against it really isn’t going to change anything.