Legocam: My Lego webcam from 2000, working on a modern Mac (blog.benjamin.ie)

I think it's a good thing, because using a LLM like this is the first time most people have used a computer as a computer. It's the first time people have actually made something via an intermediary that executes on their computer as opposed to installing an application built by a developer.

In so many ways, LLMs are the computer revolution realized. A lot of people just don't know how to write a driver, what it is, or how to investigate this. I certainly wouldn't. Nor would a lot of trained mathematicians and scientists. It's not immediately obvious how you'd tackle a problem like this to them and it creates this feeling of learned helplessness.

Now, thanks to the age of magical machines. This person wanted a piece of their chidlhood back and voila, they did and now can share it with the world if they so choose.

I do think that people should get better about attributing the machines though. I wouldn't be comfortable claiming ownership or authorship over code written by a machine entity so I do my best to mark machine-authored code as machine authored code.

An example, I know about snell's law and a little bit about optics. Nothing beyond the standard undergrad stuff (right now). I've tried Apple's liquid glass and I didn't like it. I think a part of it is that it's not translating the physics well and most implementations fall flat. It sort of either exaggerates or doesn't. Two nights ago as a passing fancy, I decided to work with codex and gpt to make it into a library that I can use for a larger research project. https://github.com/areoformed/daphnis-glass https://as-we-may-think.halfdrop.workers.dev/examples/as-we-...

It made me happy to watch a machine go off and do checks + validate the equations I gave it and to watch it write,

    > The numerical checks agree with the central magnification limit and your rainbow equation. An important consequence for the UI is already clear: the distance between the drop and the page can change both magnification and orientation. “Refraction strength” alone won’t describe the effect.

But as I did nothing more than write up a bit of insight, prod the machine, and make a detail request, I made sure that the machine entity got attribution for it, "Developed by Codex in collaboration with areoform. MIT licensed."

I wouldn't have been capable of turning that insight / thought process into code before, but thanks to the machines now I can, and I can even share it under a permissive license so that other people can find some small joy in it?

Is it soulless? Perhaps. But consider this, I found joy in turning a passing thought about physics into something that tangible that I can use for myself. That wouldn't have been a possibility for me in November 2020.

>What is anyone getting out of this completely soulless process?

A blog post, which is content. Most bloggers are wannabe "influencers" and "thought leaders."

While I'd never let an LLM write a blog post for me, I do "get" having the LLM write the code for a project like this, especially for automated debug cycles.

It's the kind of thing I'd do, and enjoy doing, even as someone who'd previously do it by hand. It's fun to make something work, even if Claude is doing the heavy lifting.

But I find myself in a weird spot now. I've completed a ton of cool projects recently, and I want to write them up in a compelling way but... "Claude did x, then Claude did y" does not make an interesting writeup, and I don't want to pretend it was all me.

I think the effort of understanding a project to the extent that I can write about it well is almost equivalent to just doing it myself in the first place.

Unless you don't use OBS :P

Cool!

Oh that's awesome. I made some stop motion films as a kid, using a webcam and some freeware on Windows.

I had a bunch of play-doh, but no art skills, so it ended up being 100% blob monsters.