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That makes sense. I think of it like visual movement, a difference in position over time. Even a single step represents a change in position, even if the time increment is very small. The transition is the animation, the duration would be 2 frames: up, and down.

In a nutshell: put two different frames in sequence, and you have an animation.

When does a woodworker cease to be one? When he uses a handsaw? A circular saw? A sawmill?

When a tool blurs the line between who performed the task

Who saws the wood? He who operates the tool, or the tool performing its function? What is the value of agency in a business that, supposedly, sells product? Code authorship isn't like writing, is it? Should it be?

Or is the distinction not in the product, but in the practice? Is the difference in woodworking vs lumber processing?

Or is it about expectation? e.g. when we no longer expect a product to be made by hand due to strong automation in the industry, we prepend terms such as "hand-made" or "artisanal". Are we currently still in the expectation phase of "software is written by hand"?

I have no dog in this race, really. I like writing software, and I like exploring technology. But I'm very confused and have a lot of questions that I have trouble answering. Your comment resonated though, and I'm still curious about how to interpret it all.

Have you considered the Framework Desktop setup they mentioned in their announcement blog post[0]? Just marketing fluff, or is there any merit to it?

The top-end Ryzen AI Max+ 395 configuration with 128GB of memory starts at just $1999 USD. This is excellent for gaming, but it is a truly wild value proposition for AI workloads. Local AI inference has been heavily restricted to date by the limited memory capacity and high prices of consumer and workstation graphics cards. With Framework Desktop, you can run giant, capable models like Llama 3.3 70B Q6 at real-time conversational speed right on your desk. With USB4 and 5Gbit Ethernet networking, you can connect multiple systems or Mainboards to run even larger models like the full DeepSeek R1 671B.

I'm futsing around with setups, but adding up the specs would give 384GB of VRAM and 512GB total memory, at a cost of about $10,000-$12,000. This is all highly dubious napkin math, and I hope to see more experimentation in this space.

There's of course the moving target of cloud costs and performance, so analysing break-even time is even more precarious. So if this sort of setup would work, its cost-effectiveness is a mystery to me.

[0] https://frame.work/be/en/blog/introducing-the-framework-desk...

Their work has molded a lot of my views on technology, such a breath of fresh air when I first found out about them! They really inspired me to look at my own work and ask how to make it more resilient, how to decrease dependencies.

From my experience, achieving provider independence boils down to: own your stack, work offline-first, test failure modes constantly.

Been trying to get a setup going with NixOS + local AI + custom CLI tools for development work, and I never would have thought to pursue this sort of thing if I hadn't found these people. Great stuff!

Oh and ORCA is a LOT of fun! Give it a shot if you're into sounddesign, or generative electronic music stuff: https://100r.co/site/orca.html

Thanks for sharing your setup! I'm also very interested in running AI locally. In which contexts are you experiencing decent success? eg debugging, boilerplate, or some other task?

Well then. I'm Belgian, and I was considering exploring security more professionally. But I think I'll just stick to hobby hacking, and pray I never discover a vulnerability. Yikes!

No good deed left unpunished.

The culpability we share for "churning out shitty code" is spot-on imo. There's been so much incentive to shipping "good enough", that even the definition of "good enough" has been backsliding. Sometimes even to the point of "whatever we can get away with", in the name of speed of delivery.

That friction has always been there, in my experience. But this is the first time I'm seeing it happening around me. LLM's are so divisive, and yet the more extreme positions on either side seem to be digging their heels in, as if the tech is not in flux.

Maybe we need a little Cave Johnson energy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt6iTwVIiMM

Your improv comparison resonates. I'd add that it also reflects the positives of improv. The freedom, being present, lower inhibition/impediments, the positive feedback loop of AI's "yes, and!". These are useful for the same reason improv is to written material. As a sketchbook, trying ideas and really finding the bellylaughs you write into the stage routine.

Ooh, definitely trying this out! I ended up homebrewing a whole context maintainance ritual, but that was a pain to get an AI agent to consistently apply, so it spun out into building a whole project management... thing.

This looks much more thought out, thanks for sharing!

That's an interesting idea! I struggle with the same issues you've mentioned, that space between the IDE integrated option and pure CLI. Your comment sparked an idea of using something like vim or similar where you can edit the config on the fly and reload it. I wonder how hard it would be to bolt a prompt interface to the front to have it build the editor for you?

It would likely quickly devolve into typical editor config bikeshedding, only AI powered? At least for me, maybe someone smarter could streamline it enough to be useful though!

My aspirational heroes! There's so many people underserved by our current level of technology, and for no good reason other than what I imagine is "business sense"? What are we doing with all this tech if it can't reach so many? Did we really advance as a species? I lose so much of current tech if I take a walk in the woods, it's ridiculous.

Even just keeping their views in mind as I'm learning and experimenting, I'm noticing there's so much cloud-dependence without good reason, beyond "convience"? Really glad to have discovered their work early in my career, it's been nothing but quality learning!

I don't want to be bound to the "modern world" and its city centers. I want to see the rest of it too, to stray from the fire of a broadcast tower without being left in the cold. I have a torch, I just need to light it.

I really appreciate you going into such technical specificity, thank you! I'll have to steal that siri for linux setup, that sounds awesome. Exploring ways to make use of compute people have lying around to do useful things without the vendor dependencies. But I'm relatively new to the AI scene, so your input really boosts my learning speed, thank you again!

Do you have anything to share on that workflow? I've been trying to get a local-first AI thing going, could use your insights!

Thank you for sharing this, it's really helpful to have this as top-down learning resource.

I'm in the process of learning how to work with AI, and I've been homebrewing something similar with local semantic search for technical content (embedding models via Ollama, ChromaDB for indexing). I'm currently stuck at the step of making unstructured knowledge queryable, so these docs will come in handy for sure. Thanks again!

Thank you for sharing these! I've been looking for something productive to do over the summer. Why not make some "useless" stuff, huh?

Okay I am definitely applying, but I need to build one of these first!