Had a look at "multi-agent coding" today.

[tommorris@mastodon.social]

Had a look at "multi-agent coding" today.

Apparently, the first step is signing up for the premium plans from OpenAI, Anthropic AND Google. So that's £50 to £500 a month. Then installing a massive pile of NodeJS to coordinate it all.

A few years ago, we were all celebrating how computing had gotten cheap: RasPi Zeros for a tenner, old HP workstations or ThinkPads on eBay for £100.

Having to pay three different landlords to build software seems like an incredibly shit vision of the future.

[weargoggles@mastodon.social]

@tommorris the results from local coding models are nearly as good, but very limited by how much VRAM you have and whether your hardware has optimisations for tensor compute. A good part of what you’re paying them is hardware rental. But if you have a M series Mac with at least 16G, or a 2020s discrete GPU with substantial VRAM, no need to rent, or mess with package managers. Just one of the OpenCode or Ollama desktop apps and your own machine.

[recantha@mastodon.social]

@tommorris It's the future, baby! Good grief... #facepalm

[hiiaminfi@mastodon.social]

@tommorris Not to question the entire premise but - isn’t that just one step further on the SaaS arms race? Isn’t that why „computing got cheap“ because the computing and the storage live in data centers and not in desktops?

[jmax@mastodon.social]

@hiiaminfi @tommorris No. That is the exact opposite of correct. Compute got cheap because hardware got cheap, because Moore's law and "business must always grow exponentially" religion, which Moore's law superficially confirms.

The hardware used in large data centers didn't drive that; it followed it. The fable that the monopolists lowered prices is a retelling of 20th century factory stories.

[jmax@mastodon.social]

@hiiaminfi @tommorris The drive to keep data and do computation in large central facilities is about control, and nothing else. We are well past the point technically where we could do all we do without centralizing it all. Except for LLMs, which is why the techbros love them, and are trying so hard to force them on us.

[elricofmelnibone@mastodon.social]

@tommorris It's only shit if you're the one having to pay the subscriptions. It's heaven if you're the one on the receiving end.