Interesting! Thank you!

Also worth noting that some of the workflows that were available in languages like CL or Smalltalk back in the 80s are superior to what most languages offer today.

In what ways? I don’t have any experience with those so I’m curious.

I get what this is saying but on the other hand…

Programmers now:

💪 Can spin up a minimum viable product in a day

💪 Writes web applications that handle millions or even billions of requests per second

💪 Remote code execution and memory related vulnerabilities are rarer than ever now

💪 Can send data across the world with sub 1 second latency

💪 The same PCIe interface is now 32x faster (16x PICe 1 was 8GB/s, while PCIe 6 is 256GB/s)

💪 The same wireless bands now have more throughput due to better radio protocols

💪 Writes applications that scale across the over 100 cores of modern top of the line processors

💪 JIT and garbage collection techniques have improved to the point where they have a nearly imperceptible performance impact in the majority of use cases

💪 Most bugs are caught by static analysis and testing frameworks before release

💪 Codebases are worked on by thousands of people at the same time

💪 Functional programming, which is arguably far less bug prone, is rapidly gaining traction as a paradigm

💪 Far more emphasis on immutability to the point where many languages have it as the default

💪 Virtual machines can be seamlessly transferred from one computer to another while they’re running

💪 Modern applications can be used by people anywhere in the world regardless of language, even things that were very difficult to do in the past like mirroring the entire interface to allow an application that was written for left to right languages to support right to left

💪 Accessibility features allow people who are blind, paralyzed, or have other disabilities to use computers just as well as anyone else

Just wanted to provide come counter examples because I’m not a huge fan of the “programmers are worse than they were back in the 80s” rethoric. While programmers today are more reliant on automated tools, I really disagree that programmers are less capable in general than they were in the past.

Couldn’t you get more energy density with compressed air? That way the entire volume of your warehouse is storing energy at the same time.

So it segfaults after one whole second instead of immediately?

Wearing a tech company backpack in public, especially in the rougher parts of town, is like wearing a sign that says “scrawny nerd probably with expensive electronics, come rob me.”

Thompson’s teeth: The only teeth strong enough to eat other teeth.

I personally like programming too much to ever vibe code as they say. Solving problems and organising things is why I like programming in the first place.

America going full sour grapes right now. “We weren’t the first to develop this technology so obviously the technology sucks and is not viable.”

Colour me unsurprised

There’s a saying in Mandarin that translates to something like: Being in different professions is like being on opposite sides of a mountain. It basically means you can never fully understand a given profession unless you’re actually doing it.

LLMs can’t even stay on topic when specifically being asked to solve one problem.

This happens to me all the damn time:

I paste a class that references some other classes which I have already tested to be working, my problem is in a specific method that doesn’t directly call on any of the other classes. I tell the LLM specifically which method is not working, I also tell it that I have tested all the other methods and they work as intended (complete with comments documenting what they’re supposed to do). I then ask the LLM to only focus on the method I have specified, and it still goes on about “have you implemented all the other classes this class references? Here’s my shitty implementation of those classes instead.”

So then I paste all the classes that the one I’m asking about depends on, reiterate that all of them have been tested and are working, tell the LLM which method has the problem again, and it still decides that my problem must be in the other classes and starts “fixing” them which 9 out of 10 times is just rearranging the code that I already wrote and fucking up the organisation that I had designed.

It’s somewhat useful for searching for well-known example code using natural language, i.e. “How do I open a network socket using Rust,” or if your problem is really simple. Maybe it’s just the specific LLM I use, but in my experience it can’t actually problem solve better than humans.

Assembly, LLVM IR, etc

  File "<python-input-0>", line 2, in a
    a()
    ~^^
  [Previous line repeated 988 more times]
RecursionError: maximum recursion depth exceeded

Microsoft really creating the problem and then forcing you to use their solution.

For real

Take your best on which will kill us first: the climate apocalypse or the robot apocalypse.

The name is an insult to the people who write software for vibrators.

“Your responses will be used to train the AI. By participating in the interview you give us an exclusive, worldwide, non-revokable license to your voice, likeness, and anything you say or write during the interview.”

BREAJING NEWS: Alzheimer’s is just an SQL injection in the brain being exploited!