indigoabstract

Got roped into watching the whole video. He obviously loves C++. And since I actually enjoyed it, I suppose that also tells something about me.

Also read up on sheafification really quick. Neither Firefox nor Chrome seem aware of it (red underline), so there.

Edit: If anyone is actually interested in interpreted C++, I think AngelScript is the most practical way for this.

Delightfully weird and niche article.

And I wouldn't be surprised if there were more retired left handed surgeons in their 50s living in rural Switzerland than people who understand what he's talking about.

For some reason while reading this, I thought of Erlang, a language I know nothing about, except that it's not a visual language and it's build out (many) processes, kind of like a tiny internet with server and client nodes that can be taken down anytime for repairs or updates.

Maybe there's an unobvious way to make visual programming actually useful?

Probably quite a few people have wondered that throughout the ages. I know I have.

In the meantime, this AI thing happened, emphasizing even more the use of text/voice as a mode of creative expression.

Modern AI is built on data. Trusting that our conversations will not be used for training the model is a bit like giving a glutton their favourite food but making them promise not to eat it. Sure, why not.

I still expect that our conversations will not leave the premises (ie end up on the internet), because that would be something else, but other than that, I knew what I signed up for.

I think what matters most is that we now know that it's possible, that a computer mimicking most of our abilities (but not all) which we have long considered intelligent is obviously possible in some indeterminate future.

It's not obvious how long until that point or what form it will finally take, but it should be obvious that it's going to happen at some point.

My speculation is that until AI starts having senses like sight, hearing, touch and the ability to learn from experience, it will always be just a tool/help/aider to someone doing a job, but could not possibly replace that person in that job as it lacks the essential feedback mechanisms for successfully doing that job in the first place.

I think you would have really enjoyed living in the '50s, when the future was bright and colonizing Mars was basically a solved problem.

What we got instead is a bunch of wisecracking programmers who like to remind everyone of the 90–90 rule, or the last 10 percent.

That was a just plot twist (play against another DK), not a badly designed puzzle. They are very different.

The author is complaining that because the game didn't warn him to change his strategy, he was unfairly beaten and forced to restart the level (and so wasting his valuable time and money). And indeed, you cannot break enemy walls in DK1, nor can they break yours, that's by design.

But this is just playing a 30 year old game with today's mindset. Now everything is faster, gamers have more limited time and even more limited attention spans and different expectations. Back then, you would just see it as a challenge, restart and beat the level, all without making any fuss about it.

It's like, did people in the middle ages complain that washing was hard and they needed washing machines to save time?

Probably not, but people today certainly would. It comes down to expectations.

The critique about the game betraying his trust is something only a contemporary player could come up with.

Back then, this type of complaint would simply not have crossed anyone's mind, not even in people who didn't like the game.

I played it from start to finish when it came out and thoroughly enjoyed it (and did it again about a decade later).

Then I did the same with DK2 in '99, though I mostly remember the "Disco Inferno" gag more than anything else about that game.

I guess the first one made a more lasting impression.

Can anyone explain why was this article flagged?

> In the future the structure of the LLM may be modified or it become one module out of multiple that is required for agi. > The real answer is nobody knows.

This is all just my opinion of course, but it's easy to expect that being an LLM that knows all there is to know about every subject written in books and the internet would be enough to do every office work that can be done with a computer. Yet strangely enough, it isn't.

At this point they still lack the necessary feedback mechanism (the senses) and ability to learn on the job so they can function on their own independently. And people have to trust them, that they don't fail in some horrible way and things like that. Without all these they can still be very helpful, but can't really "replace" a human in doing most activities. And also, some people seem to possess a sense of aesthetics and a wonderful creative imagination, things that LLMs don't really display at this time.

I agree that nobody knows the answer. If and when they arrive at that point, by then the LLM part would probably be just a tiny fraction of their functioning. Maybe we can start worrying then. Or maybe we could just find something else to do. Because people aren't tools, even when economically worthless.

I don't know what will come in the future, but to me it's obvious that any variation of LLMs, no matter how advanced won't replace a skilled human who knows what they're doing.

Through no fault of their own, but they're literally blind. They don't have eyes to see, ears to hear or fingers to touch and feel & have no clue if what they've produced is any good to the original purpose. They are still only (amazing) tools.

So if I understand correctly, it's basically down between:

1. cure cancer

2. fix the economy

3. keep everybody happily employed.

And he's saying we can only pick two, or pick one. Except for the last one, that's not really an option.

I think this saying applies here pretty well: Horses don't die when the dogs want them to.

The example is kind of pedantic, but I think a linter might be able to catch it.

Also GNU, since it's not-a-unix.

Seems pretty silly in hindsight and probably was back then as well. If communist committees could write like Lem, the world would be a much richer place today.

What stuck with me after reading many of his works was this underlying theme in several of his novels, of the futility of trying to make contact or reason with alien entities which are so vastly different from us, no bridge of understanding is possible.

On a lighter note, his electronic bard from The Cyberiad is pretty spot on, quite similar to the LLMs we have now.

It's interesting what you can build now without looking under the hood. But if he wants to continue using the app, he's about to find out that there's more to software that just coding a prototype.

Interesting, but I'm puzzled.

If these guys are smart enough to predict the future, wouldn't it be more profitable for them to invent it instead of just telling the world what's going to happen?

Nice. Looks like a hacking game user interface.

He's the Immortal Dutchman.

Using natural language to specify and build an application is not unlike having a game design document before you actually start prototyping your game. But once you have implemented the bulk of what you wanted, the implementation becomes the reference and you usually end up throwing away the GDD since it's now out of sync with the actual game.

Insisting that for every change one should go read the GDD, implement the feature and then sync back the GDD is cumbersome and doesn't work well in practice. I've never seen that happen.

But if there ever comes a time when some AI/LLM can code the next version of Linux or Windows from scratch based on some series of prompts, then all bets are off. Right now it's clearly not there yet, if ever.

It looks like were're going to have AIs helping us play Minecraft soon. It seems like they did have to nudge it in the right direction though so it could discover how to mine diamonds.

And then there is the fact that voice isn't the dominant mode of expression for all people. Some are predominantly visual thinkers, some are analytic and slow to decide, while some prefer to use their hands and so on.

I guess there's just no substitute for someone actually doing the work of figuring out the most appropriate HMI for a given task or situation, be it voice controls, touch screens, physical buttons or something else.

Calling it rapid prototyping doesn't sound as cool as it used to, now that there is vibe coding. Especially when its pure shiny 100% AI.

It seems like such a hippy thing to do.

After perusing the article, I'm thinking that maybe Ferraris should be more like Volvos, because crashing at high speed can be dangerous.

But if one doesn't find that exciting, at least they'd better blaze through the critical sections as fast as possible. And double check that O2 is enabled (/LTCG too if on Windows).

Some developers enjoy coding and some enjoy paychecks. Some enjoy both.

Just a guess, but I think it's because that's how web sites were in the '90s. People had pretty low res screens back then.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my feeling is this all started with the GPUs and the fact that unlike on a CPU, you can't really step by step debug the process by which a pixel acquires its final value (and there are millions of them). The best you can do is reason about it and tweak some colors in the shader to see how the changes reflect on screen. It's still quite manageable though, since the steps involved are usually not that overwhelmingly many or complex.

But I guess it all went downhill from there with the advent of AI since the magnitude of data and the steps involved there make traditional/step by step debugging impractical. Yet somehow people still seem to 'wing it' until it works.

Hmm, better start preparing those Voight-Kampff tests while there is still time.

While reading the article I enjoyed pretending that a powerful LLM just crash landed on our planet and researchers at Anthropic are now investigating this fascinating piece of alien technology and writing about their discoveries. It's a black box, nobody knows how its inhuman brain works, but with each step, we're finding out more and more.

It seems like quite a paradox to build something but to not know how it actually works and yet it works. This doesn't seem to happen very often in classical programming, does it?