utopiah
Super, thanks again for taking the time to do so.
I can’t remember if I shared this earlier but I’m jolting down notes on the topic in https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntelligence so I do also invest time on the topic. Yet my results have also been… subpar so I’m asking as precisely as I can how others actually benefit from it. I’m tired of seeing posts with grand claims that, unlike you, only talk about the happy path in usage. Still, I’m digging not due to skepticism as much as trying to see what can actually be leveraged, not to say salvaged. So yes, genuine feedback like yours is quite precious.,
I do seem to hear from you and others that to kickstart what would be a blank project and get going it can help. Also that for whatever is very recurrent AND popular, like common structures, it can help.
My situation though is in prototyping where documentation is sparse, if even existent, and working examples are very rare. So far it’s been a bust quite often.
Out of curiosity, which AI tools specifically do you use and do you pay for them?
PS: you mention documentation is both cases, so I imagine it’s useful when it’s very structured and when the user can intuit most of how something works, closer to a clearly named API with arguments than explaining the architecture of the project.
Thanks for that, was quite interesting and I agree that completion too early (even… in general) can be distracting.
I did mean about AI though, how you manage to integrate it in your workflow to “automate the boring parts” as I’m curious which parts are “boring” for you and which tools you actual use, and how, to solve the problem. How in particular you are able to estimate if it can be automated with AI, how long it might take, how often you are correct about that bet, how you store and possibly share past attempts to automate, etc.
You’re right, it’s not “just” Proton. I also tried recently GoG for Pod and… it just worked! From buying the (sigh) Windows game to playing on Linux in literally minutes. Amazing.
For WMR I don’t know unfortunately. Monado does work though and I would check https://lvra.gitlab.io as it’s a great starting point, maybe starting with the Monado SteamVR plugin.
So… FWIW I post often about I have a painless NVIDIA experience, including playing Windows only games, including VR games.
I thought “Damn… how did I get so lucky?” and yesterday while tinkering with partitions (as one does…) I decided I’d try a “speed run” to go from no system to a VR Windows only game running on Linux.
I started from Debian 12 600Mb ISO and ~1h later I was playing.
I’m not saying everybody should have a perfect experience playing games on Linux with an NVIDIA but … mine was again pretty straightforward.
I’d argue it’s easier with Ubuntu and accepting non-free repository, probably having the same result, ~1hr from 0 to play, without even using the command line once.
improves my experience coding in unfamiliar languages
Alan Perlis said “A programming language that doesn’t change the way you think is not worth learning.”
So… if you code in another language without actually “getting it”, solely having a usable result, what is actually the point of changing languages?
FWIW I did try a lot (LLMs, code, generative AI for images, 3D models) in a lot of ways (CLI, Web based, chat bot) both locally and using APIs.
I don’t use any on a daily basis. I find it exciting that we can theoretically do a lot “more” automatically but… so far the results have not been worth the efforts. Sadly some of the best use cases are exactly what you highlighted, i.e low effort engagement for spam. Overall I find that either working with a professional (script writer, 3D modeler, dev, designer, etc) is a lot more rewarding but also more efficient which itself makes it cheaper.
For use cases where customization helps while quality does matter much due to scale, i.e spam, then LLMs and related tools are amazing.
PS: I’d love to hear the opinion of a spammer actually, maybe they also think it’s not that efficient either.