177 karma · joined May 24, 2020
Select to translate is almost a standard feature for translation software. Not sure if the situation gets better now, but back then the software was written, using clipboard as temporary storage is a very robust and maybe the only way to implement such feature.
Trivia: It's likely sending Ctrl+C and reading clipboard to get the selected text. No easy cross-platform API for this lol.
Also note that the software is very old and poorly maintained.
If there's anything we can learn from it - don't use obsolete software.
> (from the original article) In fact, I found it better to let ChatGPT generate a toy-ish version of the code first, then let it add things to it step-by-step. This resulted in much better output than, say, asking ChatGPT to generate production-quality code with all features in the first go. This also gave me a way to break down my requirements and feed them one at a time - as I was also acting as a code-reviewer for the generated output, and so this method was also easier for me to work with.
It takes a human who really knows the area to instruct ChatGPT and review the output, point out silly mistakes in the generated non-sense, and start next iteration. This kind of curated posts always cut off the most part of the conversations and the failed attempts, and then concatenate successful attempts with outputs of quality. Sure, it will be helpful as a super-IntelliSense. But not as helpful as the post suggested.
I've tried to do something like in the post, but I was quickly bored with waiting output, reviewing, all the iterations. One important aspect about programming is that reading code may not be easier than writing code. And in my case, it's more painful.
maybe not true.
There are many threads where new products got comments of "useless" and then launched. HN users are smart, picky, and not representative for crowds.
Other HDL based on scala includes SpinalHDL.
These two HDL are pretty welcomed because of opensource and usability. You can find lots of projects in them. Notably rocket-chip, which is also in chisel. https://github.com/chipsalliance/rocket-chip
They're around for a while but still young and some people are pushing for adoption.
One important aspect of software is that it's not much easier to read than rewrite the code. Currently AI generated code needs much reading and checking, and some rounds of chats to iterate. I am even not quite happy to read humans' code, nevertheless AI's.
Only when one day AI can code that needs little human intervention will the article mean something to me. But is that ever possible? The crux is that a software bug is not in the code, it's the mismatch between the code and our mental model. Programming language is a precise way for us to present the mental model. Without a program, how do we tell AI precisely of our mental model? By natural language we can never do that. Even we can do that, we're only repeating a program in a extremely unconvinent way.
I do agree that AI can help developers spend less time on boilerplate and creeping in documentations. It can greatly improve productivity of the software industry.
Though AI can help people understand and locate code snippet, which is very helpful to newcomers to a project.