You’re comparing being the founder and CEO, to being an employee hired to run a fraction of an organisation?

"They do not know the meaning of what they generate but the output is important to us."

Isn't that a good definition of what bullshit is?

You seem to be talking about a production-grade model rather than building an LLM as an exercise? Or if not, why do you disagree with the article's example of building a small LLM for $100?

I think I should have replied as a totally separate comment. This is my mistake.

It is nice that the author shared the results of his exercise / experiment. Just got sad as I was reminded (when the 100 USD were mentioned) that all this game is 90%+ about money and hardware rather than skills.

That being said I really like the initiative of the author.

I understand the emotional aspect of feeling like it’s out of reach for you.

Thing is, if you focus on your own skill development and apply it at even a small scale, very few people do that. Then you go for a job and guess what, the company has resources you can leverage. Then you do that, and ultimately you could be in a position to have the credibility to raise your own capital.

Play the long game and do what you can do now.

Not at all. The majority with the current AI craze not really about credibility or skills. It's like a kitchen.

Take a genius chef but give him rotten ingredients. He sweats, he tries, but the meal is barely edible. That's the $100 exercise, but only experts recognize the talent behind.

Take an unskilled cook but give him A5 Wagyu and prepared truffles. The result tastes amazing to the average person who will claim the chef is great (the investors).

It's about access to capital and selling a story ('ex'-Googler doesn't make you competent), not skills.

Great chefs in dark alleys go unnoticed.

Mediocre tourist traps near the Eiffel Tower are fully booked.

Look at Inflection AI. Average results, yet massive funding. They have the "location" and the backing, so they win. It's not about who cooks better; it's about who owns the kitchen but who sells a dream that tomorrow the food will be better.

We don't talk about small funding, we talk about 1.3 billion USD, just for that specific example, yet a tourist trap (using name-dropping / reputation instead of talent)

Snake-oil is rewarded as much as, or even more than real talent; a lot of people cannot see the difference between a chef and the ingredients, this is what I think is sad.

it's skills first and then money and hardware for scale

A more skilled person that understands all the underlying steps will always be more efficient in scaling up due to knowing where to allocate more.

basically... you always need the skills and the money is the fine tuning.

That is true for many kinds of software where you need a big amount of resources. No matter how skilled I am, I cannot build Facebook, Google, Photoshop alone. But a tiny version of it just to learn? Why not!

You could 100% build Facebook. You don’t need any hardcore hardware before you have many users.

How is knowing the commutative properties of operations more significant than being able to do basic arithmetic?

I'd imagine millions if not billions of people have found basic math useful without ever learning what "commutative" even means.

More important in the sense of being able to understand higher abstractions, not necessarily more important in a strictly practical day-to-day sense.

I pay for a lot of software eg I used Screen Studio a couple of times, liked it, dropped a couple hundred bucks for it. Good work from a solo dev.

Datastar have basic functionality in the pro license. Basic UX capabilities like animation and copy to clipboard.

The devs aren’t “very clear” that most people should never need the license. That’s just PR. They’ve picked a bunch of features that even a teenage hobbyist might want to use as part of a trivial application. There’s no relationship between the locked features and their value or complexity.

I would avoid any web framework that might get in my face like this, at some random moment working on a pet project to try out a new thing, with an invoice demanding payment if I want to use random features.

“Perhaps this is a problem that you might like to address yourself?”

No I’m good, thanks. The Datastar community needs some work, going by the attitude of their defenders in this thread. Someone else is saying the way they charge money isn’t a monetization strategy. It’s nonsense.

Nothing wrong with charging money. Just be honest about it, take it in the chin when people don’t want to buy, and ideally have a pricing strategy that makes sense.

They literally don't care if people want to buy it. They tell people not to. So there's nothing to take on the chin.

Copy-to-clipboard is a support heavy feature?

Do you really think Datastar is of such ridiculously bad quality that even simple features require a lot of support to get working?

Use the Navigator API directly then? Why do _need_ a declarative version of it?

Pointed critiques of barely-concealed misdirection.

A todo list is a unique thing, it’s about remembering to do all the things you said you’d do. There’s no implied consistency from one todo list to another.

A checklist is used repeatedly, and it’s about completing a task (or set of tasks) to a certain standard. If you’re following a checklist, you’re aiming for consistency.

Pointing out that LLMs are deterministic as long as you lock down everything, is like saying an extra bouncy ball doesn’t bounce if you leave it on flat surface, reduce the temperature to absolute zero, and make sure the surface and the ball are at rest before starting the experiment.

It’s true but irrelevant.

One of the GP’s main points was that even the simplest questions can lead to hundreds of different contexts; they probably already know that you could get different outcomes if you could instead have a fixed context.

From my perspective, your argument is:

- AI gives me huge, mediocre prints of my own shitty pictures to fill up my house with - AI means I don’t have to talk to other people - AI means I can learn things online that previously I could have learned online (not sure what has changed here!) - People who cross-check multiple websites for information have a limited perspective compared to relying on a couple of AI channels

Overall, doesn’t your evidence support the point that AI is reducing the quality of your information diet?

You paint a picture that looks exactly like the 21st century version of an elderly couple with just a few TV channels available: a few familiar channels of information, but better now because we can make sure they only show what we want them to show, little contact with other people.

“the bubble won't pop, but deflate into a wrinkled 10 day old helium balloon”

Love it :)