I tried to answer all the questions and it placed me in the extreme doom category while I would place myself closer to the center because I do not hold any particuarly strong opinions and I struggled to answer coherently some questions (e.g. I don't "expect" anything of the future or AI, I don't think "good future" is something I can conceptualize, same for "harm" on the level of society, etc.)

It placed me there too, and I think that's accurate.

hmmm the system's def not perfect. hopefully the process was still useful?

thanks for your feedback; if you publish your results, i'll look into it and try to figure out where things went wrong

I'm not following -- what does it have to do with your teacher being non tech-savvy? A tech-savvy art teacher would also tell you not to trace. Tracing doesn't really help you develop your drawing skills, any reasonable art teacher would be against that.

Tracing definitely develops skills. I know many artists have traced their favorite works to get a sense of how it was put together. The trace doesn’t have any artistic value though.

Not at the level that children at schools have. Once you have the skills, you can use tracing to "research" other people's techniques but that's not something that you would be taught as you are developing the core skills because it's useless for that.

Edit: I can also see the use of tracing with very small children or beginner adults with poor motorics to develop muscle control, to learn how to control the line weight and variation. It is really ineffecient when learning how to see and understand the 3D forms, though.

Nowadays every adult can imagine that you can just scan something of a catalogue, enlarge and print on a PC. In the late 90s, there were people that had no idea this is even possible, let alone a teenager would have capability to do it.

Tracing an enlarged image can be accomplished using a box with a small hole in it and a light source. Any art teacher should have imagined that possibility in the 1890s, let alone the 1990s.

Finally a thread to traumadump my anxieties!

I have been trying to learn programming unsuccessfully for many years (I still ocasionally get a burst of energy, try something, then eventually abandon it halfway). In the end, I just accept that I don't have the kind of thinking that makes this effort enjoyable and I cannot achieve anything good.

But, to be fair, LLMs also don't solve any problems for me in any meaningful way. I have to do a little bit of very simple coding at work and I would say that I struggle with LLMs as much as I do when I try to solve them by myself. The code works in a moment but when it gets extended, it breaks, I spend a lot of time troubleshooting. Last week I had to rewrite the code myself as my attempt to prompt fixes with LLMs just kept adding bugs -- I can't say my rewrite is any good (I need to traverse graphs and I don't know how to do it properly so I just used whatever algorithm I found in a book lol), it will probably break the next week when I need to change it or add something but I hope at least I'll be able to fix it faster as I have roughly an idea what's happening.

I haven't measured how much time I spend on things with or without LLMs but the subjective experience is pretty poor -- I work in an "engineering-heavy" company, the constant feeling of not understanding my own work among people who have master things that are 10x more complex is pretty depressing. When I program something poorly, I can at least explain what I did and what my idea was, even it was a bad one, waking up to build failures and spending an entire day relearning my own project is not good, man.

As for the obvious argument -- "you're using it wrong" -- I might be? I did try to learn prompting and I don't think I do any obviously stupid stuff like specifying a persona. At this point I feel half-insane as a frequent sentiment is that non-programmers can generate code for functioning software with LLMs, perhaps it's low quality code but it works. Except for me -- a non-programmer who fumbles it every day! I don't even need anything complicated -- they're Python extensions for a Sphinx project!

People do it for the pleasure of figuring out obscure stuff. The point is dealing with that old unsupported tech as much as the games themselves.

Yeah, people on HN don't do anything for the pleasure of anything but to be productive and provide value to whoever. So, don't bet on people here understanding this mindset.

The business/money and startup culture is only a part of HN. I'm here because computers are cool and news hits here fast (also the comments can be interesting). I don't care about IPOs, unicorns, celebrities, AI, etc. I like to see the new Asahi Linux updates, Dolphin progress reports, new OpenBSD releases, discussions about vim and emacs or other unix tools, stories of repairing old arcade hardware, that kinda stuff. Some guys on IRC used to post HN links all the time and at some point I became one of them. Perhaps I'm a minority, but I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.

Early works set in the Noon Universe[0] by brothers Strugatsky were pretty optimistic in spirit.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noon_Universe

I also wanted to mention the Noon Universe, but I have to point out that two of the most famous books of the series(Трудно быть богом - Hard to Be a God[0]; Обитаемый остров - The Inhabited Island[1]), which are also my favorite books of the series, are also sort of set in a dystopian world. They had to sneak some dystopian worlds into the utopian universe to make it more interesting.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_to_Be_a_God

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_Power

I'd say that everything post Hard to Be a God had either a streak of disillusionment or something like anxiety over, idk, incomprehensability of the universe and progress, but early works were pretty uplifitng.

"Noon 22nd Century" was very optimistic and inspiring, I really liked it as a kid and dreamt of becoming like the scientists in these stories. Even something like "Far Rainbow" had a grim plot but an uplifting sentiment regarding the nature of human spirit so to say? The tragedy happened but people faced it with strength and honor, so to speak.

I share the sentiment as a gamer but according to preservationists the majority of games have already been lost to history.

Is this really true? Or are we counting like the games kids made in a computer lab somewhere.

Or there's this 87% number, but it's based on "no longer a legal way to buy it," not that it's not archived/preserved: https://gamehistory.org/87percent/

> Or are we counting like the games kids made in a computer lab somewhere.

We don't have to count amateur projects but the commercial releases in the US is not the entirety of the gaming history. There are other countries with their own rich gaming histories and other platforms (e.g. browser, mobile) that don't get the same attention as American releases for PC or popular consoles.

I cannot play a single game from my childhood, they were early flash games "for girls" and they were not in English. Nobody archived those.

What are the examples of artfully crafted software? What software can never be made with LLMs?

Not a loaded question but a genuine one.

This is really neat, thank you for sharing.

I have, and it has never been good for my purposes. In English, I just can't find things I need, in Russian, I find things I wish to never see again, tbh.

What is your experience with it?

Edit: The best search for my purposes historically has been on Pinterest. Unfortunately, not anymore. I normally search for visual artifacts (photos, art, schematics, etc), out of all search engines Google is still the only one that is somewhat functional for me in this regard.

I tried DDG, Kagi, Yandex. None of them worked for me.

Have you tried its image search? It's pretty good compared to its competitors. Google's image search fell off as they severely nerfed it.

Google is terrible these days, I agree.

Sure. The models are still not open source and should not be called open source.