lilbigdoot

What are all those mobile devices and servers running on?

> Those layers of proper abstraction is what's largely missing currently. Or rather, is merely vaguely approximated.

This I can agree with, and my perspective would be that we have theoretical solutions with no ergonomics, and rely on unproven (as in formally proven/validated) mechanisms. WASM + capability passing is enough, but the WASM layer is still built on an OS or runtime that is not proven and you'll have a heck of a time trying to build a product on it

Because systemtic problems are often better explained through structural relationships rather than personal failings?

I don't disagree with the point that a lot of software that isn't pressured to be shipped quickly still ends up following bad practices, but I don't think we can ignore that the quality issues in software aren't also found all over in many industries because of profit motives?

Right, it entertaining to me to prompt an LLM with a build error or a runtime dependency error and it will literally start reverse engineering things before even attempting to look at docs.

> The only way to do that is to make your code provable. That again is only realistically doable using AI.

I think that LLMs actually cannot do this right now while people can?

Also there is a lot of defensive programming that has been left to application and runtime layers because of dated security models in our OS and permissions that are way too coarse. It's a lot easier to write a correct program when you don't have to check every path and do that perfectly when the permission system can ensure that no files that haven't been whitelisted cannot be read

Idk I routinely see the LLMs repeat validations that already happen in another layer or it imagines things that don't exist

I'm convinced Claude is just an energy vampire in machine form at this point lol

Right, for me Qwen 3.8 is perfectly usable for a lot I just wish it was faster.

I've been making a lot of use of it because its the first model in a while I can actually bounce ideas off of and it doesn't try to immediately solve the thing or drown me in irrelevant edge cases that aren't applicable

I recently saw a language posted that caught my interest. I went into the docs and read the page "How X compares to Y", and Y is my favorite language

Within the first couple of paragraphs and bullets it made a completely false claim that is the opposite of how the language operates, something any person that knows the essentials of it would know. Language Y was listed in the front page as an inspiration (and I don't doubt them) but clearly they either did not read the docs the LLM wrote or did not use the language for long enough to know it has zero structural typing

> I tried to have an AI iterate on a step i don't fully understand yet and i always regretted it.

I had to accept this one too even for pretty simple things. I had an LLM wire up a neovim connection handler for me without bothering to read the libraries docs or neovims RPC spec and I completely regretted it. You would thing such a small piece would be fine but I couldn't work on it and had to rip it out and rewrite it, and reading the AIs reference code actually got me more confused than anything.

I've found the sweet spot for me is just writing code and promoting an AI whenever I have a question or if I'm not sure the code will do what I think. When I hit a point and I groan about doing something, if it's small and I understand what needs to happen already I will ask the LLM I've been prompting already to do it. Usually by that point it's already gotten enough context from the back and forth on my questions or me explaining assumptions it got wrong when reviewing my code.

One side is trying to escape suffering and death, the other is trying to create profit from their work.

"Voluntary" is not a word I would use to describe any agreement where one side is choosing between the deal and physical danger or potential death.

I think you need to pause and consider how significant the mind is in the body. I've lived in my car before and I will take that over consistent psychological distress of something like that. I don't think that's universal but I really think viewing awful images and text all the time would fuck me up.

One thing never changes: class warfare :o

The fact basically this entire comment section has been downvoted says so much about HN

Odd I thought that only proves them right, it's a best attempt with natural language by capital and the state, the two major forces of power in our society, and they still get burned.

Good point. Writing has to create a narrative in a way code does not. It's generally very structured when written for others and not just ourselves, and I would say you can probably be looser with writing than code in the small but once you get into paragraphs, code starts being more flexible (I don't mean theoretically just my own opinion on what's common). Ie codes syntax is fixed but the composition is very flexible while writing prose is very flexible but you will find only so many ways of writing paragraphs or pages because we are so often using writing to create a narrative arc.

Then why do I greatly prefer reading code snippets over language in basically every setting that software is involved in? I say this as a hyper verbal person (ie: much of my internal world is dominated by language and I could never shut the fuck up as a kid, or today, really)

I don't think any one form is close to my thought and I can definitely say diagrams and code often sit closer to how I think about systems than language.

I also think articulation is also a separate skill. I've met brilliant people that weren't great writers but that doesn't stop them from designing and understanding or building complex things with great accuracy

Yup. For me up until 90/100ish it's a pretty significant improvement all the way up and after that I don't know if I could notice outside of a fast game or wiggling the cursor over a contrasting color

I'm sure a lot of people now would feel odd if you gave them a 60Hz phone after high refresh has become so common, even if they don't pay conscious attention to that kind of stuff

Right I feel like they just got to a point where they can reliably write individual functions with direction. Every time I've tried to use them consistently I feel like I just end up spinning wheels from them doing things that mostly work until it crashes and burns or just has straight up missing things or half truths. Skill issue or not it doesn't work for me.

Still glad I basically never have to debug a build issue or memory error again though

Oh this is funny I completely forgot and installed FreeBSD today, I'm doing a refactor on my compiler so this is a good first target. o7

Thank you. These things are clearly designed to make people complacent and reliant and we already see studies showing how they legitimately cause negative cognitive effects in a lot of people. The further this goes on the more fucked up I think these things are, stealing everyone's works with no attribution or anything to produce a tool that consistently insists that it sits in the driver seat while you sit back and let the thinking machine do your thinking. Doesn't matter how many times you tell it to stop trying to replace your part in the process, it will try its best to solve a problem it doesn't even understand for you, leaving an incomprehensible buggy mess behind that only it can continue on.

I'm still in the middle of reading but I wanted to comment first that I had a pleasantly surprising experience a few years ago with CGI. I hadn't thought about CGI since I was a kid and I was tasked with adding a simple dynamic page to a server that had nothing running yet except apache. For whatever reason I though to try out CGI because of how simple the page was going to be, and yeah. Would recommend

I just got C FFI working in my LLVM based language last night so I'll need to take a look at playing around with BCHS :)

> to shipping a bunch of half finished copies of the same systems.

This one is why I never stuck with unity. You were always either learning something that was going to be replaced, but the replacement never really came. Add on top a lack of CI friendliness (it might be different now but years ago it was clearly not designed to let you build projects from a CLI or script), install sizes, slow starts, still using a mono fork with patches instead of .NET core, etc I just couldn't stick with it

It feels like this really awkward place now where Godot is much nicer and faster for when you don't need all of the features that unity provides, while Unreal arguable offers more depth and features. The one thing Unity had going for it there was that .NET and reloading code was better than (in my limited experience with unreal) C++/blueprints

Godot hit this really nice sweet spot of consistent UX, complete enough features to get you by as an indie, and a clean enough codebase + design that I felt like if something was missing from the engine that adding it myself was reasonable (ie: at one point I was writing a raymarching based renderer for fun and adding it as a new render seemed like a reasonable project even solo)

I do think the ECS direction Unity started to go was a good call, and I actually did enjoy it, but after waiting for long enough I sort of just forgot about it at this point

Very cool, I've been using macos so long but am also young enough to forget & finding it surprising just how long that monochrome watch pointer has been around.

Its fun playing around and seeing how much has stayed the same in desktops since then, and so far the most surprising thing to me was that a scrollable text area does not re-render the text as you move the scroll bar with your mouse

Totally makes sense that it wouldn't be worth the cycles back then, but its one of the few things that was actually surprising to me today

I forget how much it is exactly now but I saw a short video on the bandwidth of moving modern cold storage down the highway and its actually nuts

Yes I've noticed there's also this drive to implement and start talking about how it would write specific portions of code in response to design/trade off questions. I have to prompt Sol/Astra almost every time with a note that I am not looking for implementation advice since I mostly use them as a rubber duck in the design phase

Plenty of easy configs for them too. Lazyvim has been pretty batteries included and easy to modify for me and I'm definitely the type that did not read much of the docs

Ngl it would be kinda fun for everyone to meme with each other on slop mode in slop threads

Making lots of things and learning what works. It's good to read and find ideas to grow, but a volume of work is the most important thing. You'll discover a lot of the ideas on your own out of need. Keeping an eye out for tools and ideas related to what you enjoy can help broaden your horizons, but time spent making things is best