I had a job when I was in HS working in an office of a importer and exporter of cigars and the guy who ran the company thought I was a computer genius with rare super powers because I knew how to set up a mail merge in word and excel to make his invoic...
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Anyway today I did a mail merge (in google docs) and someone was very impressed. More impressed than by the Apache server that I set up... that just makes my soul cry.
It's not any easier. In some ways it's worse now.
Computers, I tell ya.
@futurebird
Once upon a time any computer could generate and send (e)mail.
So send an address and some text to mail and iterate through lists and it was done.Then people started to want bold, italics, comic sans etc, and a word processor got involved, and it got harder.
And then Google partly solved the spam problem and it had to go through their server, and got harder.
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@futurebird @aeveltstra I don't *like* it, but I had really expected one of the big obvious use-cases for "AI" agents would be exactly stuff like "Hey, how can I send a templated email to the 500 people in this list?" And "Can you make this spreadsheet look more professional?" And "The grammar checker is complaining but I don't understand why!" Basically, "Help me operate this software that's too intimidating for me to learn."
I don't know if any of the AI stuffed into MS's latest can help with such things or not. It doesn't feel like the sort of thing they would prioritize these days.
It really isn't helpful. Or it's not much more helpful than looking on reddit. I think this is what a lot of people think AI will do, help "regular people" be more like invested users who like computers.
Thoughtful software design can do this. An LLM can't.
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@futurebird @aeveltstra I don't *like* it, but I had really expected one of the big obvious use-cases for "AI" agents would be exactly stuff like "Hey, how can I send a templated email to the 500 people in this list?" And "Can you make this spreadsheet look more professional?" And "The grammar checker is complaining but I don't understand why!" Basically, "Help me operate this software that's too intimidating for me to learn."
I don't know if any of the AI stuffed into MS's latest can help with such things or not. It doesn't feel like the sort of thing they would prioritize these days.
@futurebird @aeveltstra I don't like it because I agree all ends would be better served by improving the intimidating software in the first place. And if LLMs are really such warp-speed advancements in software development, that should be easier now than its ever been, right?
But desktop applications are a stodgy backwater for software developers, now, I guess. The best minds of our generation are trying to figure out how to get us to see more ads.
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@plantfeest @Jirikiha @futurebird selling new tech without their customers' understanding of what th is tech does is where the profits are, so I'm pretty sure that Silicon Valley are going to be taking a hard pass on this advice
Maybe Silicon Valley is not the intended recipient, but the people buying, or rather NOT buying shit, ahem, new tech.
Get refurbished instead, repair/upgrade/learn about what you got, save yourself a shitload of money
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@futurebird @aeveltstra I don't like it because I agree all ends would be better served by improving the intimidating software in the first place. And if LLMs are really such warp-speed advancements in software development, that should be easier now than its ever been, right?
But desktop applications are a stodgy backwater for software developers, now, I guess. The best minds of our generation are trying to figure out how to get us to see more ads.
I imagine your question being asked on a open mic at a big conference with total innocence:
"And if LLMs are really such warp-speed advancements in software development, that should be easier now than its ever been, right?"
The audience nods. Looks to the speakers. They all look at each other hoping they don't have to take this question.
A tumbleweed rolls by.
The silence stretches into years and the better software never shows up.
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I imagine your question being asked on a open mic at a big conference with total innocence:
"And if LLMs are really such warp-speed advancements in software development, that should be easier now than its ever been, right?"
The audience nods. Looks to the speakers. They all look at each other hoping they don't have to take this question.
A tumbleweed rolls by.
The silence stretches into years and the better software never shows up.
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I imagine your question being asked on a open mic at a big conference with total innocence:
"And if LLMs are really such warp-speed advancements in software development, that should be easier now than its ever been, right?"
The audience nods. Looks to the speakers. They all look at each other hoping they don't have to take this question.
A tumbleweed rolls by.
The silence stretches into years and the better software never shows up.
@futurebird @WesternInfidels @aeveltstra incredible strides have been made in the last month in software dev. Too much to type in a toot, but codex5.1 does some great stuff. These tools make expert devs much more efficient and they can run while you sleep. Saw this with my own (skeptical) eyes yesterday.
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@futurebird @WesternInfidels @aeveltstra incredible strides have been made in the last month in software dev. Too much to type in a toot, but codex5.1 does some great stuff. These tools make expert devs much more efficient and they can run while you sleep. Saw this with my own (skeptical) eyes yesterday.
@noplasticshower @WesternInfidels @aeveltstra
"they can run while you sleep"
Tell it to make the mail merge easier and let me wake up to that being fixed and everyone at my work using the mail merge without bugging me tomorrow?
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@futurebird @WesternInfidels @aeveltstra
AI visionary in vintage eighties track suit leans in to mic..."Have you tried our new Mountain Dew Extreme AI"
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@futurebird @WesternInfidels @aeveltstra
AI visionary in vintage eighties track suit leans in to mic..."Have you tried our new Mountain Dew Extreme AI"
@Baikal @WesternInfidels @aeveltstra
"It's got electrolytes. It's what plants crave."
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I desperately want to be impressed by software design. Even for just a moment once again in my life.
I want to think "wow computers are a great idea that save me time and solve problems"
The other teachers who were doing a similar task to me, just decided to write out their documents by hand, it was faster. I could save time by writing a script but they can't do it on their own.
The inefficiency of it all tortures my soul! Even as I understand why it exists.
@futurebird @aeveltstra Unrelated to mail merge, but for A++ software design in a writing app, I really like iA Writer. @ia
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@noplasticshower @WesternInfidels @aeveltstra
"they can run while you sleep"
Tell it to make the mail merge easier and let me wake up to that being fixed and everyone at my work using the mail merge without bugging me tomorrow?
@futurebird @WesternInfidels @aeveltstra that should be a snap. I am not kidding. It is set up for PRs...uses JIRA, builds test cases and canaries, etc
The IDE for everything days are coming to an end.
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@futurebird @WesternInfidels @aeveltstra that should be a snap. I am not kidding. It is set up for PRs...uses JIRA, builds test cases and canaries, etc
The IDE for everything days are coming to an end.
@noplasticshower @WesternInfidels @aeveltstra
What do you mean by "IDE for everything days" ?
I thought you were being sarcastic with your previous post and I was agreeing but now I'm confused.
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@noplasticshower @WesternInfidels @aeveltstra
What do you mean by "IDE for everything days" ?
I thought you were being sarcastic with your previous post and I was agreeing but now I'm confused.
@futurebird @WesternInfidels @aeveltstra I am not being sarcastic at all. Look into codex...
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I can't blame microsoft when google docs is just as bad.
You need to use their "apps script" to do a mail merge OR install one of the add-ons made by third parties which means giving up a LOT of privacy to ... someone.
I wrote some app script to avoid exposing my students grades and names to ... just anyone.
To me mail merge is an obvious core feature of "office software" So why is it still so obscure and hard to do? Where is the "progress?"
@futurebird I totally agree with all your points, but I think building a good mail merge is tricky for two reasons.
One is that it takes a thing that people are familiar with and tries to add a new dimension. Some people, especially the kind who go into programming, find this sort of meta-work easy, even preferable. But for a lot of people it's sheer wizardry.
The other is that the word processor and the spreadsheet are basically fossilized. Somebody from 30 years ago would have no problem using Google Docs today. And they're close metaphors to paper formats that go back at least hundreds of years. They're just not well suited to meta-ization like mail merges.
People have tried innovating there without much luck. E.g., Lotus Improv was wildly successful in niche markets, but disliked by mainstream audiences. Even today things like Notion and Firebase and Salesforce, nominally for everybody, tend to be handled just like your cigar boss did: putting a primate interface on top of it.
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I can't blame microsoft when google docs is just as bad.
You need to use their "apps script" to do a mail merge OR install one of the add-ons made by third parties which means giving up a LOT of privacy to ... someone.
I wrote some app script to avoid exposing my students grades and names to ... just anyone.
To me mail merge is an obvious core feature of "office software" So why is it still so obscure and hard to do? Where is the "progress?"
@futurebird @aeveltstra Perhaps because paper letters are nowadays considered unfashionable. Not true of course, but the only 'personalized' business letters I receive are transparently mail-merge looking, and feeling fake.
Remembering how in a previous life, I set up mail merge for LaTeX. It really exists. No recollection of what precisely I used. A vague suspicion it was this
https://www.texlive.info/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/textmerg/textmerg.pdf
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@futurebird @WesternInfidels @aeveltstra I am not being sarcastic at all. Look into codex...
@noplasticshower @futurebird @WesternInfidels @aeveltstra
I've never used AI for coding. Not because I'm hesitant but because I could never think of a use case.
Before AI I had to tell a computer what to do and run it.
Now with AI I can tell a computer what to do and run it.
Except that now I don't know how it works, or if it will break.
What is the value added? Is it mainly for people who don't know how to code yet?
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@noplasticshower @futurebird @WesternInfidels @aeveltstra
I've never used AI for coding. Not because I'm hesitant but because I could never think of a use case.
Before AI I had to tell a computer what to do and run it.
Now with AI I can tell a computer what to do and run it.
Except that now I don't know how it works, or if it will break.
What is the value added? Is it mainly for people who don't know how to code yet?
@Phosphenes @noplasticshower @futurebird @aeveltstra I'm not in the software business myself anymore. I haven't watched any colleagues use a coding LLM, I haven't used one, I don't know how common it is to use one or what kinds of problems LLMs get tasked with in practice.
There's an eye-opening demo from Dave Plummer here, though, where he describes what he wants and the ChatGPT/Codex thing gives it to him. It produces work that might take a human hours or days, but in 20 minutes or so.
It's not completely seamless, there are hiccups that he uses his expertise to overcome. But the LLM produces a much more complete solution, a much more promising foundation, than I would have expected.
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@Phosphenes @noplasticshower @futurebird @aeveltstra I'm not in the software business myself anymore. I haven't watched any colleagues use a coding LLM, I haven't used one, I don't know how common it is to use one or what kinds of problems LLMs get tasked with in practice.
There's an eye-opening demo from Dave Plummer here, though, where he describes what he wants and the ChatGPT/Codex thing gives it to him. It produces work that might take a human hours or days, but in 20 minutes or so.
It's not completely seamless, there are hiccups that he uses his expertise to overcome. But the LLM produces a much more complete solution, a much more promising foundation, than I would have expected.
@Phosphenes @noplasticshower @futurebird @aeveltstra There are some reasons to be a tiny bit skeptical about this demo.
Plummer omits printing as a feature, which smells like he's tried this before, and found that printing was a stumbling block.
A Windows Notepad-alike is such a simple application that it was used as a teaching example pretty frequently. An LLM that's been trained on textbooks and sample code is going to be much more familiar with Notepad than it will be with whatever random thing you're seriously trying to build now.
Notepad is simple partly because it doesn't even have any of the really important, difficult code -- the text editor itself -- in it. That editor component is built in to Windows. Text editing is complicated enough that most little Notepad replacements are built on top of someone else's text editor library (Notepad++ and Geany both use Scintilla, for example).
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Totally agree. Software tries to get new users with flashy features, but then keeps them by making them scared of change.
How many little companies pay thousands and thousands for microsoft just because of some feature like mail merge that hasn't gotten any better in decades?
How many do the same with google?
What I really love is how documentation just doesn't exist anymore. The "help" menu in programs is mostly useless. "Go search reddit and stack overflow"
@futurebird
what I love is how there’s no stable version of the software any more, so if I look on line for “where can I change setting X?” I’ll find three different answers describing three different configuations of the Settings dialogs, none of which corresponds to what Settings looks like in my instance
@sovietfish @aeveltstra
