bitwize

The thing is in Lisp, data with a nice structure that you can easily work with is evaluatable as code; and all the code that runs has a nice structure and is easy to work with! You cannot easily manipulate and transform BASIC programs from within BASIC, and you cannot easily do anything in machine code.

But maybe this is part of what Gerald Sussman was talking about when he called Lisp a "low level language": like machine code, Lisp has the nice property that its default data representation is used for building directly executable programs.

In 2004, the logic driving such decisions was literally GOFAI: rules engines that fire off responses when certain criteria are met.

Well, out of the agentic harnesses available, OpenCode is the most promising and capable whilst still remaining open; proprietary alternatives like Claude Code have all these problems and more. So I guess the only way out is to just not use LLMs for development at all.

...

[chadjak.png] Your terms are acceptable.

C-f Mark Twain

Nada.

Seriously?

Yeah, as soon as I was able I upgraded my Pi 4s to be able to boot USB and used an SSD in an enclosure as my main boot volume. Works rather well.

Zig is a DOA language for other reasons though. The reason why Rust enthusiasts act so morally superior is because they are:

Rob Pike, an unsafe guy, may insist that a small language and garbage collection are enough. But the typesafe visionary Grzegorz Wielbodłąński understands the deeper truth: every invalid state permitted by a compiler is a tiny act of civilizational sabotage.

https://x.com/typememetics/status/2078572052680790237

There is no sense pretending anymore that languages with as many gotchas as C and Zig are "simple". Quite simply, they are not. The complexities lie in what's left unspoken, unaddressed, and of course undefined; failure to comprehend these completely can be catastrophic. Rust is so thoroughly and obviously the correct thing that using anything less correct should be taken as a sign of engineering incompetence.

LLMs are statistical learning. GOFAI is symbolic, rules-based stuff, expert systems and that.

There's another thing about the Commodore computers that is really special. The binaries for disk and tape games consisted of the machine code for the game, along with a stub BASIC program to jump into it (typically one line with a SYS command).

Meaning that the entire computer, and all its capabilities and speed, was available from within BASIC.

This was true of many home computers of the era, and even of the IBM PC if you were willing to struggle a bit, but it was emphatically not true of all of them: the TI-99/4A, for instance, had a nerfed BASIC that was not only very slow, it also prevented access to any of the system's facilities outside of the commands BASIC provided. This probably had a lot to do with its unusual memory architecture, in which only 128 words of RAM were provided to the CPU and all BASIC memory was accessed indirectly through the video chip.

But yeah, aside from cartridge-based games, every program on the C64 was a BASIC program, just one that was mostly a machine-code memory image.

Wait, pirate game mixtapes? Awesome!

My wife's brain could probably do that. I'm not so sure about mine.

Stephen Bourne was a fan of Algol 68, and the original Bourne shell was written in "Bournegol", which is C with enough #define malarkey to make it more Algol-like:

https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/sh...

Needs more DIVISIONs. Though I can imagine this being what would happen if the designers of PowerShell were responsible for C.

I made a mix CD for my wife for her birthday last year. It was my interpretation of Cereal Killer's "Greatest Zukes Album", featuring "great artists that asphyxiated on their own vomit" that was mentioned in the 1995 movie Hackers. So to qualify for inclusion, the artist had to either have died of drug or alcohol overdose before September 1995 (when Hackers came out) or be a band one of whose principal members died in such a fashion. It was great fun to make and my wife still listens to it.

Japan? Techno music? Pre-internet electronic communication?

This is one of the coolest things ever! It's the next best thing to being straight out of a Gibson novel!

"Synch rate" is roughly "you know how to manipulate the model to get it to do precisely what you want". This is nonobvious even for open-weights models and can change as new models are published, often under the same name as the old models.

I didn't say you did. But the industry is full of people with technical acumen but little in the way of people skills or a knack for business needs; and in the supposedly halcyon days of the past many of them could grow rich, or at least popular, by developing something cool. These people are going to have a very bad time.

The fact that Eric Raymond has gone full fascist in the intervening years was absolutely not on my bingo card back in the late 90s, but it makes CatB even less relevant now.

Of course, he would tell you otherwise. He would say that the victory of the bazaar over the cathedral has only been accelerated by AI; indeed, he doesn't write code anymore and uses LLMs to develop everything. The scary part is, he might be right about that.

Information systems has always been about empowering business leaders to produce more with less human effort. In that respect, AI for example has been a game changer. Everything else was a sideshow.

If you've been leaning hard on programming and lack the people skills to join the business class, that's on you. Things are going to get very hard for you in the near future, if they haven't already. People skills are the new moat.

Except it's not really a mechsuit; inasmuch as it is, it's more like an Evangelion: it's got bits of people's souls floating around in there; it only works well with a high synch rate with the user, which is difficult to achieve consistently; and sometimes it pops off and does its own thing anyway.

And the way you achieve and maintain deep knowledge of the shape of the output you want is... well, to write and test it yourself. LLMs are a cognitohazard. If you aren't accustomed to programming without them (or even if you are) it's hard to see the line between using them to remove drudgery and relying on them to think for you.

The Whispering Earring story reminds me of that episode of Rick and Morty in which Morty gets a piece of crystal embedded in his forehead which allows him to perceive the moment of his death; he then begins steering his actions towards the future in which an elderly Jessica (his crush) tells him she loves him as he dies, down to individual articulated phonemes and muscle actions. In the end, it's revealed this future is not what Morty had hoped for.

Giving the government wide leeway means more restrictions for you and less accountability for them? surprised_pikachu.jpg

What's super cringe is that there already was a company called Thinking Machines, which built the Connection Machine supercomputer. The CM was featured in the movie Jurassic Park and had a network fabric for its CPUs co-designed by Richard Feynman.

This is yet another techbro outfit (although founded by a techsis) necromancing the name of the former supercomputer company. It's as if OpenAI decided to call itself Symbolics for the associations with that name.

Now all we need to do is build an invincible giant robot out of it, to protect peace and justice from the forces of evil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazinger_Z

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chogokin

As I recall, Bell Labs actually abandoned Alef on Plan 9 because the concurrency primitives they wanted were doable in C so they just went with that.

Errbody gangsta until the agent figures out it's in a container and finds an exploit that lets it break out of container jail...

This whole you need to "adapt" to LLMs thing is bonkers to me, because there's practically no skill in using an LLM.

False. There was a person in this thread complaining about how the LLM forgot to run the build script it itself wrote. Yet people are effectively using LLMs to tackle highly complex, unusual work.

The existence of skill issues implies that skill is needed. This is THE skill that will separate the wheat from the chaff in a software engineering context. There's a reason why Steve Yegge said you're a bad engineer if you're writing code in an editor. It's because you've punted on developing the skillset that will make you vastly more effective.

"Nothing could have prevented this from happening," say users of only language where this happens

This is the PRIDE I meant. It's hard to tell if MBA (more recently, M&JB Investment Company) is still a going concern. Milt Bryce's son Tim was keeping the lights on but he died of cancer at the end of 2023.

And the Chinese are still going to kick our ass.

Ancaps are in for a major cope and seethe when they are forced to admit that the communists won the cold war.

Source is the new binary. Specs and requirements are where the engineering is happening now. Of course, this was anticipated in 1971 with the creation of the very successful PRIDE methodology, but it's taken a few decades, and a complete devaluation of their profession due to AI, for programmers to catch up.

Getting chicken pox as a kid means you already have the H. zoster virus in your system, and when you get older as your immune system weakens, it may come out for a second go around, manifesting as shingles. Having had chicken pox as a kid is one of the reasons why I got my Shingrix as soon as I was able.