The "calculator ruined the world" argument was actually studied to death once the panic subsided. Large meta-analyses of 50 years of data show it was mostly a non-problem. Students using calculators generally developed better attitudes toward math and attempted more complex problems because the mechanical drudgery was gone.
The only real "catch" researchers found was timing. If you introduce them before a kid has "automaticity" (around 4th grade), they never develop a baseline number sense, which makes high-level math harder later on.
It's a pretty clean parallel for LLMs. The tool isn't the problem, but using it to bypass the "becoming" phase of a skill usually backfires. If you use an LLM before you know how to structure an argument or a block of code, you're just building on sand.
You're using the motte-and-bailey fallacy. Pocket and scientific calculators have never caused anywhere near as much grief as current LLMs do as a loss-leader for near-trillion dollar corporations that are primarily responsible for artificially keeping the US economy afloat (at least prior to the latest war/not-war effort).
Peak irony: OpenAI's Codex project is being DDoS'd by its own creation.
They made code generation essentially free, and now they're drowning in AI-generated PRs that take more time to review than it would take to just write the fix themselves. So they've moved to invitation-only contributions. They built the tools that removed code as a barrier, and now they're living with what that actually means: quantity goes up, quality goes down, and every PR still needs a human with architectural context to evaluate it.
The bottleneck has completely flipped. It used to be finding someone to write the code. Now anyone can dump a 200-line PR in seconds, but the review time from someone who actually understands the codebase is the most expensive thing in the repo. That context can't be generated, it has to be earned.
They built a firehose and their own team can't drink from it.
Some users are moving to local models, I think, because they want to avoid the agent's cost, or they think it'll be more secure (not). The mac mini has unified memory and can dynamically allocate memory to the GPU by stealing from the general RAM pool so you can run large local LLMs without buying a massive (and expensive) GPU.
I think any of the decent open models that would be useful for this claw frency require way more ram than any Mac Mini you can possibly configure.
The whole point of the Mini is that the agent can interact with all your Apple services like reminders, iMessage, iCloud. If you don’t need any just use whatever you already have or get a cheap VPS for example.
If the idea is to have a few claws instances running non stop and scrapping every bit of the web, emails, etc, it would probably cost quite a lot of money.
But if still feels safer to not have openAI access all my emails directly no?
I use Terminus with Zellij and keep about 8 sessions going with a combination of Claude and Codex, and once in a while, Gemini. It's great when you're sitting in a docotor's office lobby bored out of your skull and when you get back to your desk you just join the session and it's all right there.
Yeah, I could make a similar post for similar reasons. I already have a bunch of mini-PCs I collect like Raspberry Pis. I already have a mITX build with Bazzite installed on it that I would use over a Steam Machine because it's faster. And like OP, I'd probably get anyways. Assuming price is ~800$ (with controller)
Bigger challenge is games that die because the back-end servers are turned off and the assets are discarded. I'm on a team reverse engineering an old MMO from 2011. We've spent years rebuilding the server from packet captures and disassembly because everything official got nuked. This is just one of many examples where the customer "buys" a thing in their mind only later to find out they really didn't buy anything.
The legal situation is a mess too. We're not competing with anyone (game's been dead over a decade), we're not selling anything, but we still operate in this gray area wondering what's fair use versus what crosses a line. Copyright law wasn't written with "what if the company abandons it and erases it from existence" in mind.
Meanwhile every day that passes, more of these games just vanish permanently because preservation is treated as piracy.
I hope the corporation has moved on and doesn't bother you. And if they do, we'll remember. I'll never forgive EA for C&Ding the attempts to revive Battlefield 2. Just one of their many atrocities.
I really wish that these corporations were forced to provide copies of source code and assets to the Library of Congress to have their copyright stay in effect for longer than a year. Servers and Clients. Our government is so far behind the times it hurts. Copyright should also require a renewal fee to prevent everything from getting locked behind it for a hundred years.
It makes me very angry to realize that the same people who decided to completely destroy that game still get to obstruct and/or receive benefits from any third-party effort for 61 more years.
> or receive benefits from any third-party effort for 61 more years.
...do they?
Like let's say I make a modified version of this game. Technically my modification is illegal to distribute since it contains assets I don't own the rights to. However, the creators of the original game don't own the rights to my modifications either.
ripgrep has saved me so much time, I also use it now with LLMs and remind them they have ripgrep available! I added a donation on github, thanks for all your work.
7.5 Years at Amazon, and even for my side projects, I write PRFAQs and share them with my stakeholders to gather feedback. I'm a PMT at Amazon, but in my alternative life, I code on many projects, and develop infrastructure, architecture, etc, and enjoy writing as much of it as I can.
I also added an Appendix "Technical Stack Considerations," but I like the PR and the FAQ's to focus on the customer/end-user's needs. The technical details matter, but they serve the customer outcome, not the other way around.
A recent project's tech appendix had headers like "Core Technology Philosophy", "Backend Architecture", "Frontend Architecture", "Service Architecture", "Infrastructure and Deployment", "Security Architecture", "Performance Requirements", "Configuration Management", "Backup & Disaster Recovery", "Development Workflow", "Network Architecture", "Resource Management", "Development Principles", and "Scalability Considerations".
The beauty is that by the time you get to the technical appendix, you've already validated what you're building and why it matters. The technical choices then flow naturally from the customer requirements rather than driving them.
Meanwhile, it's interesting that I do find I can focus deeper on code with certain types of music. I also have certain music I listen to when I want to write a document, such as a PRFAQ or some narrative. I've always assumed I was just "programming" myself for these modes, and the music was reminding me of the mode I was in. Perhaps it's a little of both.
The only real "catch" researchers found was timing. If you introduce them before a kid has "automaticity" (around 4th grade), they never develop a baseline number sense, which makes high-level math harder later on.
It's a pretty clean parallel for LLMs. The tool isn't the problem, but using it to bypass the "becoming" phase of a skill usually backfires. If you use an LLM before you know how to structure an argument or a block of code, you're just building on sand.