Re: OT: Re: Oh d-ai-ry d-ai-ry me

On 6/5/2025 11:39 AM, Ar Rakin wrote:

On 6/5/25 10:23 PM, Vir Campestris wrote:

On 03/06/2025 17:06, Ar Rakin wrote:

This is the reason why I tell people who write code that AI/LLMs can't ever replace them like this.  AI tools can only be a tool that you use. To write code, you'd still need to know something by yourself at the end of the day.

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As the sage said, never is a very long time.
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I started my career writing assembler. Nobody uses it any more for system work - it's much easier and cheaper to use a higher level language. Those skills I learned back then will never be performed by an API. But nor are they performed by humans any more (at least on that obsolete ISA!)

 Saying *nobody* uses assembler today would be wrong - many low level projects still need to write assembly code.  They may be not as relevant as before, but it is still used.  For example, compiler developers still need to have a very good understanding of the assembly languages of the systems they target.

Well, the fact that C11, C++11 handles atomic operations, membars, (DWCAS aside for a moment), well, I moved a little bit away from asm. Fwiw, here is some of my old code pre-C11/C++11:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060214112345/http://appcore.home.comcast.net/appcore/src/cpu/i686/ac_i686_gcc_asm.html
:^)

 

In recent years I used C++. I understand a lot of code now is written in languages like Python. You could regard them merely as a detailed spec for the processes you need the computer to carry out.
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Get that spec right, and the computer behaves. Perhaps one day the AI will be able to read a spec in English - but it will probably have to be lawyer's English to avoid ambiguities.
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Or maybe we'll have an AI that is truly intelligent...
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Andy
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 Maybe.  Nothing is impossible, but I wouldn't like the idea of AI/LLMs taking over.  Wouldn't want to see another THERAC-25 incident, caused by AI/LLMs writing code.