The XT came out in 1983, it was a real piece of shit by 1989 standards
Not to mention, the PC was a pretty, uh, "challenging" platform for video games. It amazes me someone managed to port something as graphically sophisticated as PoP to an 8088 with CGA.
PCs were incredibly expensive at the time, though, and barely useful. Most people didn't buy a new one every two years, despite the fast progress in hardware development. So many people, especially kids, were stuck with "ancient" hardware. I had friends who had an 8088 PC or an Apple II in the late 90s.
And yet, tons of comments on Threads from women saying she's been gaslit or even that the husband must have threatened her with violence and forced her to write this.
normal people -- employed, in a relationship, with chores and hobbies to occupy their free time -- simply do not participate in the gender war on the Internet. most are blissfully unaware that it's even happening. the womanosphere is a mirror image of its critically panned counterpart -- a refuge for the unhappy and/or mentally ill, an obnoxiously loud minority.
And every man as well (all the usual stereotypes, slurs, expectations non-stop), but men don’t complain, shrug, and carry on with our duties and hope she doesn’t get board and take half or more.
The conclusion was made from a 30s clip, and no amount of evidence can overturn that. New theories will be created to support the original conclusion to avoid any amount of critical self-reflection.
I recently tried to encourage my smart, technical, but not-programmer friend to build an app using LLMs and he was just like, "I still have no idea where to even start."
People talk a lot about how "real programmers" used to have to clean up or actually deploy everyone's half-baked MS Access app, and that sort of thing will probably still be the case for a while.
The whole point of the MS Access reference is that similar situations have been tropes since at least the 1990s. Bad code generated by someone who doesn't know how to program well -- whether that person is supposed to be a professional programmer but is incompetent, or has a different job -- is nothing new, and neither is having competent programmers clean it up. LLMs probably generate more of it, but can also fix a lot of it, or at least patch it up.
A year ago, LLMs were not useful for me as a programmer. Now they are: the models are better, they can use long contexts more effectively, and the harnesses are better at helping the models. Nowadays my job is mostly not programming, but LLMs let me organize and prepare tools in spare time rather than needing days or weeks of attention. I would not trust them on a 200k+ line project -- and Claude Opus 5 has issues even on 50k LOC projects -- but they absolutely can help given good direction and a narrow enough scope.
Then I don't understand at all what point you were trying to make about being miserable in our jobs. Cleaning up after bad code has always been part of the job for decades; so has balancing the creation of new technical debt against resource availability.
> The whole point of the MS Access reference is that similar situations have been tropes since at least the 1990s.
I do actually understand that.
I have done this very put the Access database on the web job myself. (FWIW I was well-paid for it and the firm I worked for earned a fortune, but this was in 1997)
I like how for example if I say contractors can be bad or even awful at their jobs and we'll all nod and agree, but to merely suggest a doctor or someone with a PHD may be, it's blasphemy.
The point is that I pay for the NYT - in part, because they do so many "digital" things right compared to other newspapers - and yet so often they refuse to do the absolute bare minimum of hyperlinking.
That's really not the point. The point is that many legacy media outlets deliberately avoid putting hyperlinks in their stories because they care about keeping people onsite more than they do about fully informing them. It's very typical for news outlets to report on criminal indictments without providing any link to the charging documents, for example, likewise with public reports.
When we were using Hypercard or BASIC to make dumb little programs, we weren't learning any of that stuff either, really.
Making apps is so complicated now that without a little bit of help from LLMs, most kids would probably just give up.
Heck, lots of professional software developers are using LLMs to get over that hump on their side projects for the very same reason.
It's hard to even get started nowadays, and LLMs lower the barrier of entry. This is a good thing.
EDIT: Also, maybe this kid doesn't dream of being a programmer? And they just want an app that solves their immediate problem? Everyone here is being unnecessarily harsh. I hope none of you have kids.
> When we were using Hypercard or BASIC to make dumb little programs, we weren't learning any of that stuff either, really.
> Making apps is so complicated now
Well that is not entirely true, I recall trying to learn game development. A lot of the time I spent was searching posts on web forums or asking questions in DAL/EF/Free/etc net and getting told to learn how to ask a question... not only that but I had learned it was better to write games not engines. Though I still managed to find out about GDI, which led me to DirectX, OpenGL, and then SDL. Those were scary... This is also when I learned about modding games, specifically Half-Life modding, which for some reason led me to creating bots for Counter-Strike just because I could and that is when I learned ladders are really difficult.
Speak for yourself (re learning)? Lots of young ppl are curious and determined and willing to dig into the guts of a thing to understand how it works.
I agree re LLMs lowering the barrier of entry generally being a good thing, but I also find it disingenuous to present this as anyone's work at all, really.
All of the copy on the page (e.g. the "Made with <3 for X") reads to me as empty mimicry of 2018-era coastal tech, and not something a 13 year old would have much context for at all. The tech itself feels like a very simple CRUD app. There is nothing wrong with that and many useful and interesting applications are just that, but I also know that this app is borderline trivial to generate/vibe code in a handful of prompts nowadays
I am sorry to be a downer! To be clear, shipping alone is a hurdle, and that counts for something. Also, not every work needs to be novel or demonstrate outstanding creativity or copywriting skills
But one element of making things that's overlooked is taste. I think that's what is missing here for me -- it's not really transparent which choices were made by the LLM and which were made by the kid.
re: "taste" - whatever that even means here - you could say the same thing about any of the thousands of Bootstrap or Tailwind or whatever CRUD apps made over the years.
You are pointing out the use of generic front-end frameworks and claiming that it is a similar phenomenon, in that using generic frameworks can result in bland visual design with little evidence of taste or intention on the part of the creator, resulting in products that are visually unappealing and uninteresting. I agree with this.
If you care to develop this thought further, I would love to read it -- at the moment, it seems half-baked, unless you just wanted to point out the similarities.
All I did was counter this weird narrative "When we were using Hypercard or BASIC to make dumb little programs, we weren't learning any of that stuff either, really."
Why did you presume I had taken a position on LLM usage?
So? It's 13 years, not months. They're perfectly capable of learning that stuff by now.
> Making apps is so complicated now
I haven't noticed. Why do you think it's so complicated? Making things with GTK, Qt, PHP etc. seems even easier now than it was two decades ago when I was 13 and learning this stuff. Browsers are picky with JavaScript from local files, but these days you can just launch a HTML file with Electron. There's even Lazarus if we wanted to closely replicate what I was learning with back then.
reply