I think this reinforces that “vibecoding” is silly and won’t survive. It still needed immensely skilled programmers to work with it and check its output, and fix several bugs it refused to fix.
Like anything else it will be a tool to speed up a task, but never do the task on its own without supervision or someone who can already do the task themselves, since at a minimum they have to already understand how the service is to work. You might be able to get by to make things like a basic website, but tools have existed to autogenerate stuff like that for a decade.
I don't think it does. Vibecoding is currently best suited for low-stakes stuff. Get a gui up, crud stuff, write an app for a silly one time use, etc. There's a ton of usage there. And it's putting that power in the hands of people that didn't have the capabilities before.
This isn't vibecoding. This is LLM-assisted coding.
I get the sense that "vibecoding" is used like a strawman these days, something people keep moving the goal posts on so they can keep saying it's silly. Getting an LLM to write code for you that mostly works with some tweaks is vibe coding, isn't it?
Is it bad that I’m pleased he’s struggling to stay relevant solo? This guy is responsible for the greater majority of dumb decisions Apple made and their products got instantly better the moment his influence was gone.
I have a feeling iPod's popularity had more tondo with buying up exclusive access to mini harddrives than the industrial design. Same harddrive maker deals extended to the smaller drives on the iPod mini. iPhone typically gets exclusive access to TSMC's latest nodes a year ahead of competitors. Same with airpods, getting the power draw to that level about a year before most others using their exclusive access to a TSMC node.
Having a big enough brand that buying out exclusive access to new tech isn't a huge risk is key, though they probably got the iPod HD exclusivity very cheap and weren't so big then. Then having the exclusive access builds on the quality and mystique of the brand and makes it less risky to buy in again on the next wave of exclusivity.
> though they probably got the iPod HD exclusivity very cheap and weren't so big then.
Toshiba were struggling to find a market for the 1.8" disk they'd invented. It was mentioned in passing after a routine meeting with Apple engineers and, to the latters' credit, they immediately saw the potential and called Steve Jobs to get the cash to sign an exclusivity deal. It cost them $10 million, absolute peanuts.
The Creative Nomad had a vast capacity but used standard 2.5" disks to minimise costs, making it bulky. If Creative had had the opportunity and foresight to grab the 1.8" supply chain, history might have been very different. If...
I’m a dev who pays the same 30% cut for all the platforms, and I still think that’s a bit of an over optimistic view. Anything is a transaction and someone has to benefit from that transaction or there’s no money to be made and it won’t be worth doing, same reason we as devs charge for software.
Apple/google/valve/etc are providing you a service and acting as a publisher, dealing with a bunch of legal and tax crap you probably don’t want to, and providing testing/rollout/apis/libraries and a lot of other features for you to use.
You can debate all day long if the cost for their service is fair, but you certainly aren’t getting nothing.
In addition Apple obviously has a walled garden, but android has had side loading and alternative app stores since its inception and it’s still not popular, every user wants to just use a centralized place, so every dev releases on the centralized market. Forcing Apple to change their rules may be warm and fuzzy morally, it won’t change the status quo in the slightest.
As many users have also pointed out valve and steam is the last of the publisher storefronts you likely want complain about as they do a ton for the gaming community.
This is I think a narrow viewpoint that assumes the AI will ever get truly as good as a human artist. Will it get good enough for most people? Probably, but if not Adobe then four others will do the same thing, and as another commenter pointed out Adobe is the only one even attempting to make AI tools ethically. I think the hate is extremely misdirected.
AI tech and tools aren’t just going to go away, and people aren’t going to just not make a tool you don’t like, so sticking your head in the sand and pretending like it will stop if you scream loud enough is not going to help, you should instead be encouraging efforts like Adobe’s to make these tools ethically.
There is no such thing as "get as good as a human artist" unless it becomes an actual human that lived the human experience. Even bad art starts with something to express and a want to express it.
Without that, it's only as good as a human artist in the way a picture of a work of art is.
Actual AI art would first require an ai that wants to express something, and then it would have be trying to express something about the the life of an ai, which could really only be understood by another ai.
The most we could get out of it is maybe by chance it might be appealing like a flower or a rock. That is, an actual flower not an artists depiction of a flower or even an actual flower that someone pointed out to you.
An actual flower, that wasn't presented but you just found growing, might be pretty but it isn't a message and has no meaning or intent and isn't art. We like them as irrelevant bystanders observing something going on between plants and pollenators. Any meaning we percieve is actually only our own meanings we apply to something that was not created for that purpose.
And I don't think you get to say the hate is misdirected. What an amazing statement. These are the paying users saying what they don't like directly. They are the final authority on that.
> There is no such thing as "get as good as a human artist" unless it becomes an actual human that lived the human experience. Even bad art starts with something to express and a want to express it.
There is always an actual human who has actual human experience in the loop, the AI doesn't need to have it. AI doesn't intend to draw anything on its own, and can't enjoy the process, there has to be a human to make it work on either intent (input) or value (output) side.
I’m not sure where we launched into the metaphysics of if an AI can produce an emotionally charged meaningful work, but that wasn’t part of the debate here, I recall my stance being that the AI will never get as good as the human. Since photoshop is a tool like any other, “good enough” refers to making the barrier of entry to make a given work (in this case some image) so low that anyone could buy a photoshop license and type some words into a prompt and get a result that satisfies them instead of paying an artist to use photoshop - which is where the artists understandable objection comes from.
I pay for photoshop along with the rest of the adobe suite myself, so you cannot write off my comment either while saying the rest of the paying users are “the final authority” when I am in fact a paying user.
My point is simply that with or without everyone’s consent and moral feel-goods these tools are going to exist and sticking your head in the sand pretending like that isn’t true is silly. So you may as well pick the lesser evil and back the company who at least seems to give the slightest bit of a damn of the morals involved, I certainly will.
The fact that you are a paying user who does not hate some thing that other users do, does not change the fact that they do, and that they are the final authority on what they hate and why they hate it.
It has nothing to do with you. You are free not to have the same priorities as them, but that's all that difference indicates, is that your priorities are different.
The "what is art?" stuff is saying why I think that "get as good as a human artist" is a fundamentally invalid concept.
Not that humans are the mostest bestest blessed by god chosen whatever. Just that it's a fundamentally meaningless sequence of words.
I'm not the person who responded, but I believe it came from a place of "what is art" (and you had used the word "artist").
My own position is that "art" can only be created by a human. AI can produce text, images, and sounds, and perhaps someday soon they can even create content that is practically indistinguishable from Picasso or Mozart, but they would still fail to be "art."
So sure, an AI can create assets to pad out commercials for trucks or sugary cereal, and they will more than suffice. Commercials and other similar content can be made more cheaply. Maybe that's good?
But I would never willingly spend my time or money engaging with AI "art." By that, I mean I would never attend a concert, watch a film, visit a museum, read a book, or even scroll through an Instagram profile if what I'm viewing is largely the output of AI. What would the point be?
I'll admit that there is some middle ground, where a large project may have some smaller pieces touched by AI (say, art assets in the background of a movie scene, or certain pieces of code in a video game). I personally err on the side of avoiding that when it is known, but I currently don't have as strong of an opinion on that.
The point would be to have an interesting and novel experience in an experimental medium - which has been a major driver of art since its beginning.
Also, realistically, most people want entertainment, not art (by your definition). They want to consume experiences that are very minor variations of on experiences they've already had, using familiar and unsurprising tropes/characters/imagery/twists/etc.
The idea that only humans can make that kind of work has already been disproven. I know a number of authors who are doing very well mass-producing various kinds of trashy genre fiction. Their readers not only don't care, they love the books.
I suspect future generations of AI will be better at creating compelling original art because the AI will have a more complete model of our emotional triggers - including novelty and surprise triggers - than we do ourselves.
So the work will be experienced as more emotional, soulful, insightful, deep, and so on than even the best human creators.
This may or may not be a good thing, but it seems as inevitable as machine superiority in chess and basic arithmetic.
I agree with the sentiment that "most people want entertainment, not art," or at least they do a lot of the time. I have a pretty wide definition of what is art, in that almost anything created by a human could be appreciated as art (whether that's a novel, a building, the swinging of a baseball bat, or even a boring sidewalk). But a lot of people, a lot of the time engage with movies and books and the like as merely "entertainment." There's art there, but art is a two-way interaction between the creator(s) and the audience. Even in the pulpiest, most corporate creations. I'm not engaging with cat food commercials as art, but one genuinely could. I agree that AI can generate stuff that is entertaining.
"The idea that only humans can make that kind of work has already been disproven." That I disagree with, and it ultimately is a matter of "what is art." I won't pretend to offer a full, complete definition of what is art, but at least one aspect of defining what is and is not art is, in my opinion, whether is was created by a human or not. There is at least some legal precedent that in order for a copyright to be granted, the work has to be created by a human being: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
"I suspect future generations of AI will be better at creating compelling original art because the AI will have a more complete model of our emotional triggers - including novelty and surprise triggers - than we do ourselves."
Again, by my definition at least, AI cannot create "original art." But I'll concede that it is conceivable that AI will generate entertainment that is more popular and arousing than the entertainment of today. That is a rather bleak future to imagine, though, isn't it? It seems reminiscent of the "versificator" of 1984.
> But I would never willingly spend my time or money engaging with AI "art." By that, I mean I would never attend a concert, watch a film, visit a museum, read a book, or even scroll through an Instagram profile if what I'm viewing is largely the output of AI. What would the point be?
Why not? The output of AI is usually produced at the request of a human. So if the human will then alter the request such that the result suits whatever the human's goal is, why would there be no point?
This, to me, sound like the debate of whether just pressing a button on a box to produce a photograph is actually art, compared to a painting. I wonder whether painters felt "threatened" when cameras became commonplace. AI seems just like a new, different way of producing images. Sure, it's based on prior forms of art, just like photography is heavily inspired by painting.
And just because most images are weird or soulless or whatever doesn't disqualify the whole approach. Are most photographs works of art? I don't think so. Ditto for paintings.
To your point about Instagram profiles, I actually do follow some dude who creates "AI art" and I find the images do have "soul" and I very much enjoy looking at them.
> I mean I would never...if what I'm viewing is largely the output of AI. What would the point be?
I agree with the sentiment, however..
Good luck to all of us at holding to that philosophy as AI & Non-AI become indistinguishable. You can tell now. I don't think you'll be able to tell much longer. If for no other reason than the improvements in the last 3 years alone. You'll literally have to research the production process of a painting before you can decide if you should feel bad for liking it.
I don't want to come across as judgey, gate-keeping what is in good taste or what should make you "feel bad." The human element is just a very crucial part, at least for me. Art is a way of humans beings connectig with each other. That can be high-brow stuff, but that can also be, like, pulpy action movies or cheesy romance novels. Someone might be expressing deep beautiful ideas that change my life forever, or they might think that it was totally sick to have a car jump over a chasm and through a big loud explosion. In both cases, I'm engaging with another human being, at least at some level, at that means something.
But if I see something that I think is cool and interesting, and then I discover that it was mostly the result of a few AI prompts, then I just don't care about it anymore. I don't "feel bad" that I thought it interesting, rather, I just completely lose interest.
I do fear that it will be increasingly difficult to tell what is generated by AI and what is created by humans. Just examining myself, I think that would mean I would retreat from mainstream pop-culture stuff, and it would be with sadness. It's a bleak future to imagine. It seems reminiscent of the "versificator" in George Orwell's 1984.
> AI tech and tools aren’t just going to go away, and people aren’t going to just not make a tool you don’t like
It could. Film photography effectively went away, dragging street snaps along it. If it continues to not make artistic sense, people will eventually move on.
This is exactly why when Google began requiring home addresses I just let them kill my account and refused to provide the info. It was not a dealbreaker to me anyway, I had long since moved to iOS as a developer.
I was unable to find a specific price for the model you linked in my few seconds of looking but these devices generally run in the $10,000 USD range, so I don’t think it’s achieved the “if you just want to buy it” territory yet.
I love the juxtaposition of thinking a ‘97 Camry is anywhere close to $10k while at the same time a $3k piece of lab equipment is “Christmas present territory” :)
It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost? Ten dollars?
It is genuinely disheartening when people in this board start talking about things they buy when they're WILDLY out of my price range. It's almost like living in a flyover state and working in education isn't optimal for income. Weird.
I'm an IT that has ethics, so I haven't made good money, ever. Choosing not to harm, or, in your case, actively doing the opposite, I guess we'll just have to live with being able to sleep.
Dude I have three thousand dollars net total in my bank account. I don't own a car or a house, don't have kids etc. I literally used to co-own 97 camry with bees in the trunk. I paid about $2500 for it. Hence why I say it costs the about the same as the spectrometer on eBay. $2500 is about $3000. However you and I both know that there are people all over this board who buy their kids macbooks for christmas
Hehe. Let me know if you have lived a whole life of only emotional neglect and abuse by narcissistic parents and if you share my exact autistic neurotype and maybe then we'll talk :)
How do we actually beat this narrative? I've been proposing a E2EE-based chat application to my friend, and they asked me a similar question: won't it just be rife with pedophiles? How can you make a platform that will be used to that means?
I have strong views about privacy as a fundamental human right, but I don't know how to answer that question. I certainly don't want to make the world worse, but this feels like a lesser of two evils type of deal: either make it even harder to catch bad actors, such as child abusers, or make it plausible that your government take away your freedom forever.
Instead of the word cheering we could use letting.
Bad people flourish over the inaction of good people.
(but yes, there are always several who protect and argue for things risking their own and everyone's livelihood, exposing themselves to shady elements, along singled out and elevated thin aspects, cannot understood why)
I’m happy that a government is holding itself accountable, but I seriously doubt the fine will go through - and even if it does all it does is cost the taxpayer more money due to either incompetence or just malicious intent.
The European mind can’t comprehend that most Americans think EU regulations are oppressive and unnecessary. The EU can’t comply with their own regulations isn’t a good indicator. Neither is the fact that the EU still displays cookie banners on their own website, despite that being everyone’s favorite jab at American companies.
I challenge you to find another economic system that has worked in history, because it sure isn’t communism if that’s what you’re referencing. This is also aside from the fact that Europe is also a subscriber to capitalism.
America is the most successful country on this earth and we bankroll most of the rest of the world but somehow we’re always the bad guys.
As an American I’d be very happy if my tax dollars stopped getting spent on Europe.
Somehow US Americans managed in about a year and some to almost singlehandedly fund complete destruction of already impoverished and entrapped society of 2.3 million people, most of them younger than 18. Nevermind the pressure or direct military attacks on other nations to not intervene.
And you wonder why you're viewed as baddies.
I'd be happy if your tax dollars stopped going outside of US, too.
> America is the most successful country on this earth
According to what metrics? life expectancy? crime rate? wealth per inhabitant? education? work life balance? health care? happiness? incarceration rate? human rights? corruption? freedom of press?
American tax dollars aren't spent in Europe or elsewhere in the world for some altruistic reason. The US want to maintain their hegemony and prevent other powers from emerging. They certainly don't care about Europeans or Taiwanese or whoever.
> I challenge you to find another economic system that has worked in history, because it sure isn’t communism if that’s what you’re referencing.
Not that I'm a big fan of communism or China, but communist China has been doing pretty well, and is getting more innovative than the US
The part of China that is innovative is not communist. They have the most free-market labor market, the most free-market regulations in everything except media (which is heavily controlled by the state).
China is the most brutally capitalist society in the world, with a dictator sitting on top managing it at the margins and ensuring media will never be free and threaten the communist party.
There is also the good old: "We can't discuss changes because there is nothing better already existing. There can't be anything better because we cannot change"
Like anything else it will be a tool to speed up a task, but never do the task on its own without supervision or someone who can already do the task themselves, since at a minimum they have to already understand how the service is to work. You might be able to get by to make things like a basic website, but tools have existed to autogenerate stuff like that for a decade.