scj

"because C is such a small and simple language (and one which, as you suggested, often feels like a bunch of syntactic sugar over PDP-7 assembly)."

I didn't describe such qualities of C in my previous post. At all.

And to be clear, I didn't mean "devs who learned how to program in the 1990s". I meant "devs who were active in the 1990s", which would have mostly been devs who came up in the 1970s and 1980s (where learning BASIC, then assembly was common).

I also made no claim about first languages in my previous statement. I only said there was a likely progression from assembly to C or C++ (for a C++ dev).

My point was, the talent pool in the 1990s would be able to handle the downsides of C++, and the upsides would have been a bonus. Whereas modern devs aren't used to the downsides, thus C++ is a step back for them.

What I should have added is that for devs in the 1990s, there would have been very few large legacy C++ codebases.

I'd phrase it differently, C++ was a set of power-to-performance trade-offs that were optimal in the 1990s.

Time has moved on.

More importantly, a typical 1990s C++ dev was likely someone who learned assembly, then C or C++. Meaning they already knew how to control hardware / memory allocation, and C++ was just a new set of abstraction tools. It was a step forward for them.

To modern devs, C++ is a step backwards. And a tough one at that.

Using an ASI to subjugate humans in any capacity is a terrible idea.

without sharing tech to make the ASI, you'd hope humanity could work together to determine how to align an AI for our common benefit.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw

Not 100% apt, but close enough.

A thought experiment: When all practical software is only written by AIs, will the AIs use goto? What will the programming language of AIs look like?

My bet is something _like_ assembly, but not assembly.

That being said, I think humans will still program for fun. Just like we paint portraiture in a world with cameras.

"For example, the current cities Waymo operates in do not have appreciable snow fall, and as a result neither the Waymo nor the human benchmark data include this type of inclement weather."

I'm happy to see this acknowledged, and hope it's a sign that they appreciate the difficulties of winter driving.

One of my favourite little details in Jeeves and Wooster is that British cops are shown as bumbling fools who fit right in with the cast.

Meanwhile American police are consistently depicted as trigger happy, shooting at any minor provocation.

"At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update..."

If an over-the-air patch can have that kind of impact, then what happens if security is compromised and that power is used for ill?

Could you elaborate (hopefully with real examples) of what it's like to be in the out group with few connections (or perhaps no connections) in regards to a particular good / service?

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was established in 1982. We're still in the process of figuring out what it means (and as a living document, the interpretation will change over time).

It's messy. But I'd much rather that than need to ask "What would Pierre Trudeau think of this situation?"

The "bre" in "libre" is pronounced similarly to "zebra". Kinda. It'll get you in the ballpark, which is good enough for an Anglo.

"This Hour has 22 Minutes" had a great sketch where both a Francophone (Gavin Crawford impersonating Chantal Hebert) and an Anglo (I forget who) were stumbling over proper nouns from the opposite language. The joke was that both were trying too hard to pronounce things "properly". It came off as inauthentic and awkward.

It'll likely be used to mine bitcoin instead.

Insane question, asked for the purposes of discussion: Would it make sense if those GPUs were top-of-the-line for years? Like if TSMC were destroyed?

Even then, I don't understand why being a landlord to the place were AI is trained would be financially exciting... Wouldn't investing in NVIDIA make a lot more sense?

I'm sure there's alien civilisations that are more aggressive than us, but also ones that are less so.

What is the minimum amount of aggression necessary to evolve sentience? What is the maximum amount of aggression in an interstellar space-faring species? Where is humanity on that scale?

A super-aggressive species would likely self-annihilate before possessing sufficient energy to travel interstellar distances... So the jury's still out on us.

Is it going to translate C into good Rust code, or just C with a Rust accent? Think transpiled C in Javascript.

Soon LLMs will be able to write Fortran in any language!

"you can write perfectly fine code without ever needing to worry about the more complex features of the language. You can write simple, readable, and maintainable code in C++ without ever needing to use templates, operator overloading, or any of the other more advanced features of the language."

You could also inherit a massive codebase old enough to need a prostate exam that was written by many people who wanted to prove just how much of the language spec they could use.

If selecting a job mostly under the Veil of Ignorance, I'll take a large legacy C project over C++ any day.

Could Commodore have made a financially successful low-cost Amiga laptop circa 1991 - 1993?

Consider a spoon-fed spectrum for AIs working in large codebases, where is state-of-the-art AI?

"Here's a bug report, fix it."

"Here's a bug report, an explanation of what's triggering it, fix it."

"Here's a bug report, an explanation of what's triggering it, and ideas for what needs to change in code, fix it."

"Here's a bug report, an explanation of what's triggering it, and an exact plan for changing it, fix it."

If I have to spoon-feed as much as the last case, then I might as well just do it. The second last case is about the level of a fresh-hire who is still ramping up and would still be considered a drain under Brook's Law.

I suppose the other axis is: How much do I dread performing the resultant code review?

Put them together and you have a "spoon-fed / dread" graph of AI programmer performance.

AI can draw blueprints of a house. The house may look aesthetically pleasing, but if it can't hold it's own weight, the design is flawed.

There's a difference between an executed image and a display-only image.

At a certain point, judgment requires technical knowledge.

Wouldn't it be nice if popular libraries could export to .so files so the best language for a task could use the bits & pieces it needed without a programmer needing to know python (and possibly C)?

Were I to write a scripting language, trivial export to .so files would be a primary design goal.

And how many factories capable of casting steel cannons were in the south?

Same if the King can say "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" then pardon the soldiers that do.

I'm Canadian and remember repurposing AOL floppy disks that came in the mail circa 1996.

Never used the service though.

If annexed and somehow given democratic rights, I suspect Canadians would form a protest party with the goal of budgetary shutdowns in the House of Representatives...

Zero support for any legislation other than Canadian Separation. Be a poison pill.

And that's the non-violent response.

Stallman, who apparently speaks French, said the 'L' stands for "Libre". https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html

The word matches his intent of "Free Software" without English's ambiguity around gratuity vs. freedom.

"In 2010, after twenty years under development, Stallman said that he was "not very optimistic about the GNU Hurd. It makes some progress, but to be really superior it would require solving a lot of deep problems" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd

Labour-saving devices also have a tendency to save time.

It'd be more interesting to see LLMs play Family Feud. I think it'd be their ideal game.

That begs the question: What brought you to this file?

Are features going to be de-prioritized in favour of hardening existing code? Or are employees expected to keep doing what they are doing just "with security in mind"?

The article makes it sound like the later. Which will be about as effective as "thoughts and prayers."