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https://rbelmont.mameworld.info/?p=1725

by ingve • 1 month ago

148 138 1 month ago

rbelmont.mameworld.info

varjag9• 1 month ago

It's bittersweet, isn't it. Software is solved, but at a terrible cost.

alecco4• 1 month ago

Why is it bittersweet? Carpenters probably didn't cry when their tools improved.

It will be bittersweet when there's no human needed at the wheel but IMHO we are far, far from that. These models/agents are just mimicking human text and need guidance because they often get lost or stuck.

varjag9• 1 month ago

Carpenters would have cried if all their work was reduced to shoving the logs into CNC machines.

Yes there is still human input but it requires comparatively no skill or depth and it gets easier by the month. If I were lobotimized today I'd still be able to function as half-assed architect to AIs anyway.

When was the last time you read fighting distractions/getting "in the zone"/complaint about open space offices thread or comment? They used to be a weekly feature on HN frontpage.

voidUpdate• 1 month ago

I think carpenters might cry if a company went around shoving every single piece of carpentry they could find into a machine, and then when you press a button on that machine, a chair comes out, and then they go around saying that this machine will replace carpenters forever, and they made this machine with no help from other carpenters, and furniture makers all went "who needs carpenters anymore, lets just use the chair machine"

pjc50• 1 month ago

The real problem is we built the genie in the lamp or the monkey's paw: it's a machine that gives you what you ask for!

rschiavone2• 1 month ago

How is it solved? LLMs cannot think new things, they can only cobble something together if it's in their training set.

nashashmi2• 1 month ago

I am not sure if claude had powerpc scripts in its training.

tock• 1 month ago

New things are made by cobbling together existing things.

varjag9• 1 month ago

That "only" part used to be the hardest. Getting the ideas was never the hard part. I think someone here even wrote an essay on that.

qsera9• 1 month ago

It does not think at all. It vibes based on its training and any additional bolted on constraints. It is a quite simple automation that only works by huge amount of existing data.

Modern man has grown quite dumb. He only seems to be able to "invent" by massive scaling things that are decades or centuries old..

brookst9• 1 month ago

What? This is a massive misunderstanding. It’s easy to get truly novel ideas from LLMs, unless your definition of “new things” is so strict that no human can do so either.

The training set is about patterns, not facts or specific configurations. Yes, it’s possible to extract (some) of the training set verbatim, but that doesn’t mean it’s all you can do.

antonvs7• 1 month ago

I take it that your training cutoff was early 2023.

bitwize• 1 month ago

They can think and reason better than most humans. Most problems they're pointed at are not in their training set, but in certain ways they resemble things that are—maybe there are a few different resemblances to different problems in its training set—so it's able to pull these disparate similarities together and apply the patterns it finds to come up with a solution. Much like human brains do.

jorisw• 1 month ago

Software isn't solved. 'Coding' is, according to the people of Claude.

Coding (programming) is a tedious and expensive part of software engineering. There's other parts AI isn't doing, such as understanding and refining requirements, and delivery + accountability.

skydhash3• 1 month ago

Coding (programming) is a tedious and expensive part of software engineering.

Why is that? Coding, for me, is kinda relaxing, and the fun part of developing software. Gathering requirements, especially in a corporate settings, is the tedious part and the most time consuming.

1over137• 1 month ago

Accountability?!?! Outside medical software, and similar niches, I see little accountability in the software industry.

boxed• 1 month ago

The cost is not terrible, calm down.

antonvs7• 1 month ago

This reminds me of the Go champion who announced he was giving up the game after a computer beat him.

It’s as if a runner were to give up running when beaten by a horse or a car. It suggests they may have had unexamined and perhaps somewhat strange reasons for doing the activity in the first place.

People have difficulty accepting just how significant their limitations actually are. We design our world to hide those limitations. As an example, it would be easy to make computer games that are unwinnable by humans because of our slow reaction times, low speed in general, and our cognitive limitations. But no-one makes such games, because few people would want to play them for very long.

The “terrible cost” in this specific case seems to be related to discovering that we were fooling ourselves about how good we were at software development.

varjag9• 1 month ago

I'm not giving up the career. And I certainly don't feel left behind: I'm good at programming, and I still have a substantial edge over non-programmers here in meaningfully using agents (as of June 2026). The terrible cost refers to sucking all the joy of the process as the mechanized activity makes the actual intellectual part of the work redundant, if you can understand.

Software development is now another fake job.

alecco4• 1 month ago

A perfect example of a coding agent guided by a human with domain knowledge.

ethbr13• 1 month ago

Intuition + obsessive detail-oriented execution = results

bartvk• 1 month ago

The blog mentions a Graphing Calculator. Not sure if it shares code, but macOS still ships with an app to draw graphs, Grapher.app

amenghra• 1 month ago

Grapher.app is different from Graphing Calculator. It came via an acquisition. All the details are here if you want to read the backstory (assuming the info is correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapher)

zweifuss• 1 month ago

The app on your Mac today isn't a rewrite of the legendary Mac OS 7.2.1 Graphing Calculator, but an acquired app based on Curvus Pro introduced in OSX Tiger.

The first one has a legendary backstory. 2 devs snuck into Apple after their project was canceled: https://www.pacifict.com/Story/

Curvus Pro: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/curvus-pro

donohoe• 1 month ago

Thanks for sharing the links. Love this part!

“We looked at each other, took a deep breath, and launched the application. The monitor burst into flames. We calmly carried it outside to avoid setting off smoke detectors, plugged in another monitor, and tried again.”

felixding• 1 month ago

Just wow! I’m speechless! Can’t think of any other word than “legendary”.

thepryz• 1 month ago

This highlights what I think is missing within a lot of tech companies today. I don’t know too many people who are so passionate about what they’re doing that they would sneak into their former employer’s office buildings and then find employees willing to work together with them to finish a project that simply had to get done. That alone makes me a bit sad.

relium• 1 month ago

The current Mac version of what started as the PowerPC Graphing Calculator app can be downloaded from the Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/graphing-calculator-4/id522175...

The iOS version is at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pacific-tech-graphing-calcul...

sourcecodeplz• 1 month ago

403 forbidden

nashashmi2• 1 month ago

Works for me fine

embedding-shape7• 1 month ago

Feels like it might be pertinent to share more details than simply the error code. What country? How are you connecting? Anything out of the ordinary with your setup that might be the cause?

slaw• 1 month ago

Singapore - 223.119.20.232

dist-epoch• 1 month ago

I also get 403 Forbidden, from EU, nothing special about my setup

adrian_b• 1 month ago

I also see that error code, from Europe.

Perhaps it blocks any non-USA connection.

imp0cat• 1 month ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20260618094143/https://rbelmont....

franky47• 1 month ago

"You forgot to say please"

jansan• 1 month ago

"I does not boot and it makes me sad"

I actually write prompts like that when I'm not under pressure. Claude will sometimes completely ignore your feelings, and sometimes give a little comment, which I just find refreshing in the middle of otherwise often boring sessions. And it does not have an effect on the actual result.

Tade0• 1 month ago

Codex overuses the word "quickly". I'm tempted to check what happens if I tell him to do it slowly.

bityard• 1 month ago

Crazy theory: Maybe Codex watched too many YouTube videos. I have noticed on YouTube that many younger narrators say, "I quickly did X," when "I did X" would have been more just as well and usually more truthful. Why did you have to _quickly_ cut that piece of wood when the video clearly shows cutting it at a perfectly normal speed?

Also, please try not to anthropomorphize LLMs, they hate it when you do that.

wiether• 1 month ago

I thought it was about Renaud' song _Laisse béton_

https://genius.com/Renaud-laisse-beton-lyrics

ingvay7• 1 month ago

My brain immediately switched to 'you could be mine' by guns n roses

throw0101a• 1 month ago

For those unaware, this line is from the movie Terminator 2:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ4Ol9Tb1D0

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_2:_Judgment_Day

armcat• 1 month ago

That movie has aged incredibly well!

account42• 1 month ago

Resolution-wise it hasn't due to the extensive use of early CGI.

alecco4• 1 month ago

As a story, yes. But Terminator failed on a basic premise: Skynet becoming self-aware.

The future seems more like Blindsight [1]: hyper-intelligent, completely unconscious systems outperform, out-manipulate, and out-compete human beings purely through automated efficiency.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)

mr_toad2• 1 month ago

That movie has aged incredibly well!

Except for the titular event not happening!

lizknope• 1 month ago

I clicked on the post expecting it to be something from T2 and wondered why I was reading something about emulation.

scotty792• 1 month ago

I have strong affinity for having references popping into my mind when doing something not obviously related. Sometimes the connection is obscure, sometimes the source of the reference is obscure. I highly doubt people would get many of them.

One of my favorite ones is "Third turtle lies.". When people wonder how something reported could have been possible.

mrandish• 1 month ago

When I saw the headline I immediately knew the reference. Then I skimmed that article and saw no connection to T2?

Calgaryp• 1 month ago

Asta la vista baby

mplanchard• 1 month ago

Hasta* (it’s spanish)

latentsea2• 1 month ago

It doesn't sound like it has an H at the beginning. Shame it hasta be like that.

Luc• 1 month ago

'PowerPC DRC' appears to be the code in mame that translates PowerPC machine code into native host machine code (Dynamic Recompilation Core).

https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/devices/cpu/...

rcarmo• 1 month ago

I am doing a very similar thing right now, which is adding a JIT to both Basilisk and SheepShaver: https://github.com/rcarmo/macemu - on the PPC side, we're still poking at some hardware registers that the Quadra ROMs like to noodle in.

mandeepj• 1 month ago

you forgot to say 'please'

wayeq• 1 month ago

some vague hint about what the article is about before clicking on it would be.. nice.

throwaway_2494• 1 month ago

Rapid development of a cycle accurate Intellivision emulator, much of it unsupervised. (four part series)

https://keanw.com/2026/03/a-diary-of-an-agentic-retro-gamer-...

https://keanw.com/2026/04/a-diary-of-an-agentic-retro-gamer-...

https://keanw.com/2026/05/a-diary-of-an-agentic-retro-gamer-...

I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle

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