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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: May 12th, 2025

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  • I am a dev as well, and to build a website you traditionally need a dev. Well, nowadays, you can build a website with a “no code” website builder. That’s the most common “no-code” use.

    Not that it’s relevant to this conversation, but that doesn’t stop people from hiring me to build their website, because “no code” also means “limited customization” and/or “low quality”.

    1. The OS isn’t the software building anything for you.
    2. You didn’t build a media center, you installed software that makes a media center. A “no-code” software that would build a media center would not make much sense, as there isn’t a need for any sort of customisation that would not fit into “configuration”.
    3. Your point with Minecraft does make sense, but as it does not have any use outside of Minecraft, I wouldn’t call Minecraft a no-code system. However, the system itself that you used inside Minecraft to build your automatic sorter would fit the definition, imo. Redstone is a no-code system, for sure.
    4. Firefox didn’t build it, you did.
    5. A parametric font isn’t something that would require any code to make, so it doesn’t fit the definition. What makes a parametric font useful is its support, which requires dev work, and is not no-code.
    6. A 3D print isn’t something that would require a dev to do. Of course you can always model something with lines of code, but that’s not how you’d sensibly do it.

    “Building something” and “Building something that traditionally requires dev work” are not the same thing.

    The software you use always needed code to make, but it doesn’t aim to skip the “hire a dev” phase of your project. If it does, it is “no code”.

    And for the sake of argument, let’s say that Blender doesn’t exist and no other software fulfilling the same purpose exists. Then you’d have to commission a dev (team) to create that software so that you can train people to create 3D models. But the dev building your 3D modeling software doesn’t typically have the skills to use the software afterwards, so it does not fit the “no-code” definition.

    TL;DR: It is a “no-code” software when you can skip the “hire a dev” phase of your project and use said software instead.


  • No, it definitely does not cover almost all software. Most software does not aim to allow a random user to build something that usually requires a dev.

    When you use an OS, you build nothing. When you use a browser, you build nothing. When you use a game, you build nothing. When you use a graphics editor, you build something, but it’s not something that a dev could do.

    I could go on with a list of almost all software like this, but that’s not a good use of my time, and I hope it is not necessary.






  • Of course the “understanding” of an LLM is limited. Because the entire technology is new, and it’s far from being anywhere close to being able to understand to the level of a human.

    But I disagree with your understanding of how an LLM works. At its lower level, it’s a bunch on connected artifical neurons, not that different from a human brain. Now please don’t read this as me saying it’s as good as a human brain. It’s definitely not, but its inner workings are not so far. As a matter of fact, there is active effort to make artificial neurons behave as close as possible to a human neuron.

    If it was just statistics, it wouldn’t be so difficult to look at the trained model and identify what does what. But just like the human brain, it is incredidbly difficult to understand that. We just have a general idea.

    So it does understand, to a limited extent. Just like a human, it won’t understand what it hasn’t been exposed to. And unlike a human, it is exposed to a very limited set of data.

    You’re putting the difference between a human’s “understanding” and an LLM’s “understanding” in the meaning of the word “understanding”, which is just a shortcut to say that they can’t be compared. The actual difference is in the scope of understanding.

    A lot of the efforts in the AI fields gravitate around imitating a human brain. Which makes sense, as it is the only thing we know that is capable of doing what we want an AI to do. LLMs are no different, but their scope is limited.







  • Same here. I obviously don’t remember everything because I rarely if ever have to use them, but at least when the time finally comes that I need “git bisect”, I’ll know that “git bisect” exists and I’ll be able to go straight to the manual page that documents it.

    No one expects anyone to read the manual and remember it all… But you will naturally remember the big lines and be able to refer to the right place when you need something.