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Comment by nxobject | Hacker News Reader

This raises the question: what information did Amazon Q ingest to be able to write C64 Basic, and from where – OCR'd books and magazine off Google Books? Online tutorials? That would explain whether it would be possible to adapt this workflow to supporting other relatively obscure platforms, with a limited documentation set that's certainly not available online on the internet in easily parsable HTML: e.g. PDP-11 assembly, Turbo Pascal, classic Macintosh/Macintosh Toolbox, etc.

Who knows, it might be a shot in the arm for retrocomputing enthusiasts.

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> classic Macintosh/Macintosh Toolbox

This one's probably pretty well covered, actually. All of Apple's Inside Macintosh documentation is available in PDF format, and there's plenty of old programming books and magazines which have been scanned and OCRed.

Inside Macintosh has very, very few code examples (the only one I remember is the example program at the start of the phonebook edition)

Without large code examples, can a LLM write even halfway decent code?

> there's plenty of old programming books and magazines which have been scanned and OCRed.

In my memory, the heyday of printing programs in magazines was before the Mac. Macintosh programs were too large to print in a book or magazine, and other methods to distribute code were available (ftp servers, CDs)

I would think a good LLM for assisting working on the Mac toolbox needs data from ftp sites and CDs.

I find even local LLMs like Llama can do a fair bit of retrocomputing, from BASIC to 6502 and Z80 assembly language. I doubt very much that they were specifically trained to do this; I think it just comes for free because the broad training these LLMs get from random text taken from the Internet contains this sort of stuff.

I don't think I've met a retrocomputing enthusiast yet who has a positive opinion of generative AI.

Makes sense to me. Part/most of the appeal of coding 6502 or z80 for a retro platform is just how deterministic and predictable they are down to the clock cycle. AI is the opposite.

Yeah it lowers that barrier to getting re started. It did for me at least

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