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Comment by dcow | Hacker News Reader

If he can write a correct Makefile like this at 14 then a truly formidable foe is on the rise, indeed.

Hi there! I wish I could claim that I wrote the Makefiles, but my knowledge of C is very limited and all the credit for that goes to xyzz, who created the original exploit intended for Amazon kindles. I simply created a fork that would work with the echo using the same CPU, the original code is here: https://github.com/xyzz/amonet

This is why I love the old pre-LLM world. Can’t help but imagine that already now many people just get the very same code suggested by Copilot and never even learn about the existence of the original author—whom they wouldn’t be able to credit even if they wanted to.

(The corollary being, of course, if that recognition and pride in one’s work are what drives people to do original research and share it openly in the first place, why would they do it now in this brave new world?)

On the flip side, if you know your stuff for real, interviewing is going to get about 10x less competitive!

Am I missing something here? The Makefiles seem very standard for a C/C++ project, and could have been easily replicated from a tutorial or example project without much modification.

Not suggesting that the work is not impressive, but the kids of today grew up in the era of computers and the Internet, and a lot of problems that were hard for you and me are no longer hard today.

24 years in the industry and 24 years of “it’s knowable, didn’t you know it already?” arrogance.

>and a lot of problems that were hard for you and me are no longer hard today.

I spent my teenage years learning and understanding sendmail milters. I got to a point where I could write them from scratch. Guess how useful this knowledge is today...

> Guess how useful this knowledge is today...

But today, the useful bit is the process you learned to obtain that level of mastery.

It used to be incredibly difficult for me to edit 4K footage on my computer. What’s your point? How does that undermine what young editors are doing now with 4K and beyond?

All my work arounds and tricks are completely useless today. There is some broader knowledge and problem-solving I learned I’m sure, but ultimately a lot of the tools I learned over the past 15 years are completely useless now and those youngsters are now overcoming their own obstacles!

Thank you for this. Snorted beer at my keyboard.

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