Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by CursedSilicon | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

CursedSilicon

At least in retro spaces there's a lot of rejection of using AI to do things.

Half-Life (and the later Source engine games such as Half-Life 2 and Portal) were ported without LLM assistance however

(Source: I am in the Discord where the developer has been working and diligently posting updates on the project)

View on HN

At least in retro spaces there's a lot of rejection of using AI to do things.

I suspect the community will fracture, and then once the pro-AI side shows off more and more of the amazing things they accomplished, they'll grow while the anti-AI side will eventually dry up into a few luddites.

I'm old enough to have been on the anti-HLL side when I was handwriting Asm for the PC, but of course HLLs took over because they're "good enough" and became a massive force multiplier.

A compiler and a assembler are predictable enough. An LLM will never be reproducible. Period. LLM base d AI's are doomed from the start.

You hate to see that kind of ignorance at this level of play. Wouldn't such sentiments be better expressed elsewhere, on sites not populated by users who are actively doing what you say can't or shouldn't be done?

Think whatever you want. Unless you are Donald Knuth level educated, you can't be 100% sure.

I think it is more likely that the "amazing" things, as described, will become mundane, thus shifting the definition of what becomes interesting or noteworthy. Even then, I believe people who continue to write by hand will still be appreciated, given this is fundamentally a hobbyist space.

One good example is nocash, who continues to write all of his Windows-targetting emulators in hand-rolled assembly to this very day. For a long time, some of his emulators - most notably NO$GBA - were at the forefront of popularity among homebrew developers due to their unmatched debugging tools; even though one could make them much faster with an HLL, nobody really stepped up to the task. Even now, his work remains relevant thanks to the extensive documentation he maintained alongside the emulators he developed.

NO$GBA is written in assembly language?! I can't believe it.

> All no$gba program code, both emulation and user interface, is all hand-crafted and pure assembler code.

https://problemkaputt.de/gba-dev.htm

Proud to be a Luddite.

Less so in the hobby area, more so in the "they're taking our jobs" area.

Do you make your own shirts and pants, too?

Actually, one of the larger youtubers is currently facing massive backlash from his own community because all his projects are done by the slop machine :)

The great thing about retro computing is we want to see what people come up with. Not slop bots!

To be precise, it's people using AI.

I massively disagree. If someone uses AI to port a whole game engine to $RETRO_OS and that means I can port a great game to that OS by hand that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise, everybody has won there.

I hope most people are like Obama's energy strategy, famously described as "All of the above."[1] -- the AI-powered efforts don't take away anyone's ability to do amazing "by hand" accomplishments. There's so much in the problem space that there's no chance of all the interesting projects being "solved with AI." I want everyone interested to be building things, with or without AI as they prefer.

[1] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/doc...

Yeah, I’ve definitely seen this sentiment in the retro tech community.

I think hobbiests do not have that much free time to create these tools for retro computers. AI is a great tool for this, as it saves time so people can make projects that would otherwise not exist.

I remember arguing with someone on Reddit who said they’d rather not have the tool if it was made by AI, which I thought was a crazy take.

looks like the Author is saying something different https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49092906 (He did use LLM Assistance)

It's the same as every community now. There's a bunch of people endlessly complaining about AI, and there's people using it to create projects that didn't exist before

The fact of the matter is people are going to keep using AI to create projects no matter how much the others complain about it, so I fall on the side of enjoying these new-old retro projects

Yet the dev has posted here on HN saying they used LLMs to do the port, but have a preference not to communicate their AI use.

(Removed inaccurate remark, or rather, removed my reply to an inaccurate remark)

"unsustainable" is an odd word to use for a hobby. They aren't trying to hit productivity goals. Maybe they just still like programming.

I do, too, but I'm feeling increasingly awkward doing it by hand.

NGL, it's not an altogether-comfortable feeling. At least not yet.

What a bizarre take

Many people refuse to use LLM's for various reasons that I don't need to rehash here

"Bizarre" is rejecting powerful tools on ... what, religious grounds?

It would be one thing if we were talking woodworking or pottery or another skilled craft, where your personal growth of talent with experience is evident in the product, resulting in something you can look back on fondly and point to with pride.

But moving some legacy code (which you didn't write) from one platform to another? What do you get out of doing that by hand?

You seem either deliberately or functionally unable to grasp the premise of why anyone would do this (or reject LLM's)

I suggest instead you go read up on why people dislike them and gain a more well-rounded and nuanced understanding of the topic

And you seem to be operating on a faulty premise (as was I.)

"Use it or lose it"?

It's an interesting dilemma. I can tell that I will soon start to lose hard-won programming skills to muscle atrophy, just because of how seductive the power of telling an LLM "Deal with this" is becoming.

But what I'm gaining in exchange is the ability to get more stuff done, which (to me) is what it's all about. It doesn't matter whether it's a hobby or professional project: when I start something, there's always a goal or result in mind, and whatever tools get me to that result are going to get used.

I'm not completely unsympathetic to the OP's point of view, though, where the journey itself is all the reward they are seeking. That's one reason why I deleted the comment, as it came across as more negative and critical than I intended.

I recommend you approach life in a spirit of curiosity—it can be interesting to learn about the different interests and motivations of other people!

Hi there, I'm the developer of this port.

I did use AI to assist me in development and I'm not shy about admitting that. This was still a hands-on effort that took well over 40 hours of development time spread over a couple months. Much like other development tools, AI certainly sped up my development process and allowed to ship something in a couple of months using my free time.

AI is a tool and it isn't going anywhere, I've posted my thoughts about AI extensively in the PowerPC community. I don't proactively volunteer or plaster my readmes with notes about AI because it doesn't really matter.

Speaking for me personally I have no problem using tools in my toolbelt to solve problems faster in my limited free time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com