As a user, I feel like talking to them is pointless because nothing we agree to is actually agreed until a human agrees it. The chatbot promising me a refund doesn’t mean I’m going to get a refund. The HR chatbot promising me paid time off doesn’t mean I’m actually going to get paid time off. It’s really still just like the awful old-school chatbots where the whole point was to give you a hard time finding the phone number of the human support team.
I’m not going to install this because I’m not looking for a band, but it would be cool if you could keep in mind solo musicians often need to hire a band in order to play
This could be a good way for people to find that when they don’t have other musicians in their network who can fill that role for them.
seems like something a website could do and not require an app. I hope the dev learned a lot about making an app while building this, as that seems the only purpose for app only to me. Unless they want to get at all of that precious data hoovering money potential. I have become so callused and cynical from malicious devs, that's my first thought on anything that is an app instead of a website
I think the "app" form-factor is preferrable to a "website" for a lot of people. Almost every website I've built over the past 10 years (summing to ~900k-ish users) has had constant streams of users always requesting an app alternative to the website, quote "even if it's just the regular website in an app".
Why not both? Assuming it's running off a DB in the cloud, it should be simple enough for the developer to write a web front-end for it.
I try to keep my phone lean and mean, and I'm not inclined to install an app for something I don't use all the time. Heck, even if I were to use this all the time, I would much rather use it through a web interface.
The answer probably always differs, but for me I'm just one developer without any mobile dev experience and plenty of site features to keep working on -- so taking time away from the main product to work on a complex app equivalent (and implicitly commit to update/maintain it over time with each new feature) didn't make a lot of sense.
People don't like web apps and don't know how to install PWA's (by design of the OS manufacturers that make money from developers needing to pay to be on their hosted platforms). Like it or not, if you tell someone you have a product to use on their phone, they're going to want it to be in the App Store.
Web apps should be able to be listed in the app stores. I understand why people want to find things in the store. Younger generations don't really use the internet the way us old farts did. Discovery is no longer something that SEO and ad driven search makes organic any more, so discovery is nearly impossible. Instead of Yahoo style search of webpages, we have the curated search of apps via stores. Not that the app search is amazing, but it's still a smaller subsection than all of the internet which makes it easier.
I have been using Synthesizer V for a lot of my music and the quality is very high, even with little manual tuning. There are a lot of voices to choose from now, and they added a cross-synthesis feature which lets you use the voices originally intended for Japanese and Chinese in English, and they don’t have a strong accent (I do find that I have to mess with the lyrics input a little). Also SAROS is coming out which has experimental Spanish support.
Definitely recommend looking up some Synthesizer V covers to see how realistic singing voice synthesis has become in recent years. It’s also free to try lower quality versions of the voices.
I would argue that many of the big tech companies have also been subsidised rather than being efficient. It has just been private investors rather than governments (and it feels like we are starting to see the end of that).
It always feels like open source enthusiasts would never pay for something themselves, but expect that their boss will for some reason. What would your boss get by paying that he/she isn't already getting for free?
It would help if the projects had some option to purchase a license or subscription, even if the application is open source. Lots of employees have a company credit card and the authorization to use it for small productivity purchases. But it would have to be a business expense that is easy to file, not a donation.
I think things like being able to contact anyone are important to people, but decentralisation doesn't necessarily provide that (e.g. if I sign up on a Mastodon instance will I be able to see the messages of everyone on every Mastodon instance, and will they be able to see mine? Will I even know if somebody I care about can see my messages or not?)
I think decentralisation is not a selling point to most people. It's an implementation detail that they're happy to go along with but it's a negative if it make the experience worse, makes everything more complicated, if they can't talk to the people they know IRL, etc.
LLMs always remind me of pigeons you see in the city that have spent their whole life eating out of bins and pecking dropped chunks of kebab. We trained it on a bunch of stuff, but we're not sure quite what. Looks like it works OK, so let's get it on a plate!
It’s probably the same deal as with LLMs generating code: it can crank out something that’s probably broken, and the person using the LLM needs to be able to know how to code to see where it’s broken. Companies might be able to reduce the headcount of programmers / copywriters / artists but certainly not replace them right now (or possibly ever).
I suspect that a coordination between a human programmer and an LLM doesn't require strong programming skills, but it does require strong debugging fundamentals. A month ago I had ChatGPT write a function in Racket just given a text description. Take two lists of symbols of any arbitrary length (but only if both lists are the same size) and construct a new list which selects one at random from the other two lists at the same location. There was some other logic in there, too, based on the way I'd done the structs.
ChatGPT wrote the function perfectly on the first shot, but then I realized it was only working most of the time -- turned out ChatGPT had done a really obvious off-by-one error in the loop, and it was breaking on (1/n) attempts where n is the size of the list.
It's exactly the same as how ChatGPT usually knows what formulas and approaches to take when solving graduate-level mathematics, and its reasoning about the problem is pretty good, but it can't get the right answer because it can't add integers reliably.
Yes, of course. The only people with good debugging skills are the people who have spent a lot of time debugging their own code (or the code of others). However, in an LLM-dominated environment, it may be plausible for someone to develop strong debugging skills while having only mediocre programming skills. This would be similar to the "boot camp web developer" archetype who has reasonable skills only in a narrow domain.
Full transparency: I think I'm one of those bad programmers who is a good debugger, but I've also been a full-time Linux nerd since Ubuntu 8.04, so I'm very comfortable reading error messages.
Even if the code isn't broken the issue is that the vast majority of code isn't written in a vacuum. Refactoring, rearchitecting, etc. is quite tricky.
And writing code is the easy part. Architecting is where things get tricky and there are a lot of subjective decisions to be made. That's where soft skills become really important.
I see this claim so often and I fail to understand it every time... What kind of junior devs do you hire, where this is the case? And what kind of tasks do you give them?
I think the point is to avoid a situation like with Uber (where investors subsidised Uber rides to try to destroy most of the world's taxi industry, then replace with Uber and gather all the profits for themselves).
It's going to suck for the world in general if AI models destroy a lot of jobs but the productivity gains are all paid to overseas companies like OpenAI and Microsoft.
