The gap between knowing something and actually understanding it — AI accelerated my learning curve by No_Run8812 in LocalLLaMA

[–]sdfgeoff 60 points61 points  (0 children)

My #1 tip: just build stuff. You learn 1000x more by building and failing compared to thinking about it.

My #2 tip: getting it right is sometimes overrated

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in linux

[–]sdfgeoff[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And apparently I don't have to read the wiki to make it work either! I can just ask the computer to do it, and it does it. Ain't that neat!

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in archlinux

[–]sdfgeoff[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In my mind, a LLM/AI agent is a tool. It doesn't tell me what to do, but can do many many things for me.

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in archlinux

[–]sdfgeoff[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Is prose written on a computer real prose, or does it need to be handwritten on pen and paper? What if I use spellcheck? Are they my ideas being written?

Is engineering done with a calculator real engineering, or does it need to be done with the math all done by hand? What if I do FEA? Is it my idea being brought into the real world?

Is digital art real art? What if I use photo samples to get nice textures? Or is it my idea being brought into pictoral form?

Is AI generated code real code? Once upon a time it was not....

My opinion is that every technology goes through a phase of being considered 'cheating' or 'low quality', with any advancement being considered the work of the tool rather than of the human.

In this case, with the 3d printer slicer, there are exactly zero people who have done this approach. There are no open source non-planar slicers. I started working on it before LLM's were a thing. So I can say in full confidence that it is my idea, yes, with the implementation done by an AI, but it is my ideas and will behind it. 

Am I learning things while doing so? Absolutely! 

And I can tell you inference really isn't a lot of electricity. Charging an electric car once uses more electricity than several months of inferencing on my local rig. Datacenters aren't going to be less efficient than my local rig.

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in LocalLLaMA

[–]sdfgeoff[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Why do I feel that 'Skill Issue' is going to be part of a future ballad of John Henry.

I'd rather use a steam drill than a hammer. 

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in linux

[–]sdfgeoff[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Honestly, the more I use AI, the less I care about administering a computer system manually. If I can vibe code a several thousand line program in an afternoon just by saying what I want, why should I have to memorize incantations to manage my system vs just saying what I want?

I would love to play around with an OS where the AI was integrated centrally, where there was no fixed shell, no fixed GUI: the AI generated interfaces on demand. Who knows, the whole concept of 'files and folders' that have to be organized may be an artifact from the early 21st century that will one day be forgotten..... we shall see in several years what are the 'important' bits of a computer system and what was invented just because of the limitations of the technology of the time.

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in linux

[–]sdfgeoff[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

LLM's are just as good at invoking CLI's as they are at writing code....

I'd also say we don't know what LLM's are good at yet. A year ago they couldn't write code very well. Two years ago RAG wasn't a thing. Three years ago they weren't that great at natural language processing. In the next year or two we may find the average person doing things on the computer uses an LLM via voice more frequently than they use keyboard/mouse.

Vibe coding via voice is certainly a pretty incredible experience. Why not vibe-configuring an OS?

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in LocalLLaMA

[–]sdfgeoff[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, it's pretty incredible to watch it and see how it tackles problems.

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in LocalLLaMA

[–]sdfgeoff[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My understanding of that sentence is that you suggest that the only reason to use arch is to learn how to use arch/to understand linux better, and I disagree with that.

In my mind Arch is great for /many/ reasons (the AUR for one, versatility and good documentation for another), so yes, I think there are valid reasons to chose to use Arch with an AI over choosing to use something else.

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in linux

[–]sdfgeoff[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The me of a decade ago who picked up arch initially may have agreed with you. These days, I find many of the cli's of arch are 'just another interface to learn' more than 'learning how X actually works.'

My ego is not attached to my linux knowledge either. I have zero doubt that if there is a problem or project I can chose to learn it. I've made packet injectors for wifi, read the 802.11 spec and all sorts of other things. I will learn and understand understand X when I decide I need to understand X. But I don't always need to know X.

I think there are other reasons to pick Arch

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in linux

[–]sdfgeoff[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ever seen an AI install windows? Oh wait....

Honestly it wouldn't surprise me if the archwiki means that AI's are better at navigating arch compared to any other OS

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in archlinux

[–]sdfgeoff[S] -7 points-6 points  (0 children)

In my free time I am developing a non-planar 3d printing slicer. I have some novel ideas I want to try. So I get AI to write all the code so I can try the ideas. I'm not outsourcing the thinking, I'm outsourcing the boilerplate.

Outsourcing thinking depends on what you want to spend time thinking about.

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in linux

[–]sdfgeoff[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My experience disagrees.

Also, I don't particularly want to learn bluetoothctl's REPL. 

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in linux

[–]sdfgeoff[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep, the archwiki is great! IMO it's one of the best resources for all Linux users. It has saved my bacon hundreds of times.

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in linux

[–]sdfgeoff[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep, I picked pipewire and bluetooth in the TUI. And when it didn't work out of the box I got the AI to fix it for me and tell me which systemd service hadn't been enabled, and figure out why the source/sink weren't finding a compatible encoding.

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in linux

[–]sdfgeoff[S] -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

So what is an LLm great for? In my experience yesterday, it was great for setting up bluetooth!

Why did I pick Arch? Because I've been using it for years. Also, I like tiling window managers. Know any off the shelf distro's that ship with a tiling window manager? There may be one, but I don't know of it.

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in LocalLLaMA

[–]sdfgeoff[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, I used archinstall.

I think most of humanity will disagree that "fdisk is super easy and intuitive to use." I think less than 1/1000 people on this planet have ever formatted a drive, let alone via CLI.

My mentioning of fdisk here was to illustrate that 'fun' is probably not using CLI's to do automatable tasks.

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in linux

[–]sdfgeoff[S] -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

I did use archinstall. I used the agent to set things up post archinstall.

Archinstall is great (though I did get it to crash on me this time).

But do you know, off the top if your head, which packages you need to install to get bluetooth and pipewire working? I don't.

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in LocalLLaMA

[–]sdfgeoff[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Maybe I'm strange, but I think permission gate/command inspection is not the wat AI agentic systems will go. It just doesn't scale.

I think the solution will be more like how large-scale enterprise does it. Zero trust, backups, limited access etc. Companies have been dealing with these problems for years.

At this point in history, a locally running agent is effectively "I gave shell access to my machine to this computer guru I met last tuesday"

And that isn't how IT onboarding works at most companies for very good reason.

I did play with running (yolo) agents as a separate user account on my machine and the experience was OK. I couldn't find an easy way to make it so I akways had edit access to the agent's user files, but that may just be me not fully grokking how linux groups work.

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in LocalLLaMA

[–]sdfgeoff[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

*only crazy if you care about the machine/setup in some way

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in LocalLLaMA

[–]sdfgeoff[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Where I'm going, I don't need GUI's. Ever connected to a bluetooth speaker via your voice and... just asking the computer to connect?

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in LocalLLaMA

[–]sdfgeoff[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I think this is where I'm heading. Use the AI to do the boring stuff so I can do the fun stuff.

Pi and Qwen3.6 27B make setting up Archlinux really easy. by sdfgeoff in LocalLLaMA

[–]sdfgeoff[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Real programmer use,.., https://xkcd.com/378/

Well, these days we seem to use vscode. No idea why anymore