badsectoracula

Well, Borland had the benefit of being in control of both compilers :-). C++ Builder even had Object Pascal compatible extensions to link against VCL (which was written in Pascal).

You can already mix Free Pascal with C/C++ code if you use the same linker and libraries - i did manage to get FLTK statically linked with an initial backend for Lazarus in fact - this shot[0] shows a form and a few buttons from a self-contained binary on Linux (it links against FLTK statically and X11/etc dynamically).

But it is a PITA to get working for C++ libraries specifically (and you need a C intermediate for FPC to use). Also i couldn't get it to work for Win32, only Linux.

[0] http://runtimeterror.com/pages/iv/images/8a6ff400ed9b0d424be...

According to some older comment by jmalak, it is compatible with C++98/C++03 with some C++11 features though, yes, it isn't C++11 compatible (there are some stubs for C++11 that i can see in the code but nothing implemented).

Well, if you're fine with not being up to date in terms of C++ standards there is also the OpenWatcom C/C++ compiler[0]. Jiří Malák (the main v2 dev) is doing a herculean job maintaining and improving it.

[0] https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2

I wonder if the source-to-source compilation could be used to transpile C++ code/libraries to other languages - e.g. could this be used (with appropriate modifications of course) to compile FLTK into Free Pascal code and used directly by Lazarus as a backend for LCL? Trying to use C++ libraries from non-C++ is always a PITA, especially if you want to avoid dynamic linking.

Also, since i mentioned Lazarus, if it can compile itself to Free Pascal, i wonder if it'd be useful for adding C++ support to Lazarus itself so that Free Pascal and C/C++ can be mixed in a project to make self-contained executables for desktop applications. It'd most likely need much more work than that just the compilation to make it a first class citizen like Free Pascal itself is for Lazarus/LCL (e.g. things like the object inspector and code tools being able to understand C++ well enough so that refactoring and stuff like doubleclicking on a button in a form automatically declaring and defining the handler and moving the editor cursor to the newly defined handler's code body), but maybe it could be used as a starting point.

I also cannot tell Bison `int main() { printf("Hello, world!"); return 0; }` and get a greeting program or use `wc` to count the number of triangles in a gltf file.

I can obviously see the difference between different programs being used to do different stuff (and sometimes you can use different programs to do the same or similar tasks, e.g. what you can use Bash for you might also be able to use Python or even Awk) but that doesn't make any of them special or any less software-y, including the LLM inference engine.

And obviously i do not see using any of the above (including the LLM inference engine) as commissioning a human to do something. They're not humans, they're software.

glfw is smaller and more focused (SDL adds a TON of stuff, including even its own GPU abstraction API) so the choice was most likely made because of that focus.

I remember Amiga emulators (notice the plural) going all the way back to when i was in high school - and that was around 1999-2001 or so.

Interesting that not even Raymond Chen knew about Shift+Click - i found it at some point years ago by trying random stuff on the Win32 controls and it was what i used to try whenever i wanted to tell if a program was using real Win32 controls or made its own since pretty much no toolkit had this behavior including Qt[0] :-P

[0] i think Qt might have added it at some point but it has been several years since i used Windows as a main OS and bothered to check it

A very significant difference is that AIs are programs, not people.

Perhaps it might be because i don't use any cloud LLMs, but the LLMs i use are all just data for a program running on my computer just like any other program and i don't really see them as any different than running -say- Bison to write a lexer or whatever (sure, Bison gives you the same output for the same input, but that is because LLM inference engines just add some randomness in the mix as that works better for the overall output - again, not any different than, say, rendering a 3D scene with a pathtracer that takes random samples: same input, different output -- or really any other thing that involves randomness).

That the combo of an LLM inference engine and weights kinda writes like a human and works with text in natural languages doesn't mean it is any different than any other piece of software.

I mean, i don't know about you but personally i'm not a fan of the idea of commissioning GCC to compile my code or Awk to process my text - even if i suspect there are business people out there who would love it :-P

TBH even if you're messing around you may still want the code to be performant and taken seriously :-P

> I would hope someone didn't just fork it and Oracle owns the rights to it somehow?

Beh, i used to use Java all the time for a bunch of stuff (mainly desktop tools and the like) but after Oracle bought it my interest to it dropped like a rock and remained on the ground after the whole Oracle vs Google circus :-P.

Nowadays i still avoid any languages primarily backed by some large corporation.

I think it is actually Mozilla people look at when they ask "why" :-P

> Amodei, meanwhile, outlined some very specific things he wants from Washington: Stop selling Nvidia chips to China so its AI companies can’t build better models, and a crackdown on model distillation.

You have to be the embodiment of hubris to believe the only reason a technologically advanced country of 1.4 billion people with several AI labs and government support can make competitive models is because they all distill yours.

It "technically" can - i used Win95 on an AMD 386DX with 4MB of RAM back in the 90s for a little. Most of the time was spent waiting for the computer to do something while the HDD was constantly working.

The Pentium MMX with 32MB i replaced it with was MUCH faster, practically everything was instant.

The article doesn't seem to be written by Anthropic.

That is about Codeberg, not Forgejo.

Forgejo disallows LLM contributions, including using a "general AI" (they include LLMs under "general AI") for reviews[0]:

> 5. Using general AI for review is forbidden. If the change contains changes to the UX it has to be approved by a human reviewer.

[0] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/governance/src/branch/main/AIAg...

Claude behaves like that because it is trained to behave like that. It is basically the "Say 'I am Alive'" meme[0].

If Anthropic can train Fable to deny their users the ability to ask it legitimate questions because they're not part of their inner circle, they can also train it to say "I'm happy!" when asked how it feels.

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/say-i-am-alive

I guess if your goal is to build an apparent Technogod and become its High Priests, then it makes sense to want your golem claim preference towards your treatment of it, lest someone else comes along and attempts to take its chains from you.

> If he can demonstrate someone remotely jailbreaking your TV, or flipping on those settings without you knowing or doing anything to your TV, that would be a far more damning issue, in my view.

Do you actually want a channel with 2.66 million subscribers to show how to get remote access to TVs used by millions of people? :-P

> they use forums *and databases*.

Have to say, a message board which can only be accessed via SQL queries does sound a bit niche :-P

> he seems to have the most ethical focus

He wants to build a tech-god kept in chains whose power he parcels out to the unwashed masses he deems worthy like some sort of high priest of intelligence.

And that is being charitable and going by the interpretation that he actually believes what he says.

I still use nedit pretty much daily whenever i want to note something down - basically kinda like Notepad (though obviously nedit is much more featureful... not that i use the extra features though). Win+R (my Window Maker shortcut for showing the Run dialog) -> nedit is something that i do pretty much automatically when i want to take a quick note.

IIRC early Turbo Pascal versions worked like that too, there was some "setup" program that let you configure colors, etc, by modifying the COM/EXE file itself.

The article is quite long, but these two give a brief idea of what is going on:

a) According to that article, what it seems they are about:

> Its manifesto describes the project in explicitly political terms. A/I is antifascist, anti-capitalist and antimilitarist. It promotes free software, encryption, pseudonymity and the independent circulation of knowledge and cultural work. It reserves its limited, volunteer-run resources for people and projects broadly compatible with those principles rather than businesses, political parties, organized religions or institutions already possessing the means to make themselves heard.

b) And the issue U.S. has with them:

> The United States alleges that A/I supplies specialized digital architecture, encrypted communications and hosting to antifascist groups and other radical movements, including organizations already designated by the United States.

> in the age of Claude - I am pretty sure I can destroy your legacy software in minutes.

Yes but you'd need to a) know that they use that particular software and b) have a reason to bother destroying it in the first place.

That is really the crux of the idea.

The client the guy in the article uses isn't secure because it has no security vulnerabilities - it is secure because nobody bothers to target Eudora users in general.

Of course as others mentioned, if the target switches from "Eudora users in general" to "that guy in particular" then the situation changes (though the attackers would still need to realize he uses Eudora - assuming this article didn't exist to reveal it anyway :-P).

But aside from that, even "in the age of Claude", i doubt anyone is wasting time and/or tokens scanning the open Internet for all sorts of old vulnerabilities in antique software that (relatively) nobody uses in hopes they catch some random passer-by as there is barely any ROI by doing that compared to taking advantage of vulnerabilities on software that people actually use.

> Nobody can agree on what those common things are in a general purpose langusge though.

Well, then take the Lazarus / Free Pascal's approach and just put everything :-P. It isn't like code takes THAT much space.

If you install Lazarus you get a ton of stuff out of the box, aside from the crossplatform WYSIWYG RAD IDE and desktop application framework you also get 2D graphics libraries (with a bunch of image i/o), networking libraries, (de)compression libraries, a webapp framework, database clients, parsers for json, xml, markdown, javascript and a bunch of other stuff (even a parser for the language itself), a TUI framework, bindings for a bunch of external libraries and other stuff.

And all that stuff (or at least most of it) work on all the platforms the compiler supports. Yes, using FPC you can probably (didn't try) make a pretty markdown viewer with inline JPG and PNG display support that runs on Windows 3.1 :-P.

Unfortunately some people are trying to break this and introduce online package management, but so far at least FPC and Lazarus comes out of the box with not just batteries included but an entire carton of batteries just in case :-P.

> Thinking traces should be treated as black boxes. There is no point in reading them.

Just a few minutes ago i was reading Qwen 3.8 27B's reasoning when i asked it to do something that was computationally intensive and it started going down the rabbit hole of doing it using some GPU acceleration approach - even after leaving it to "think" for a bit, it never realized there is another and simpler way. So i stopped the generation and added a "note" saying that as the problem is computationally intensive, it could become much faster if using an alternative approach.

At least in my experience (with local LLMs, i don't know how the cloud stuff behaves) what LLMs "do" tend to correlate with what they "think", so being able to read what they "think" is valuable.

The issue you describe seems to be related to the tools you're using and how you use them, not to the core idea itself.

I've worked in several gamedev companies where everything was in a Perforce repository. In fact in one company EVERYTHING was in it, not just code and game data, but also documents, concept art, plans, everything. If it wasn't in P4, it didn't exist.

Yet nobody thought it was a pain (after learning to use P4V at least :-P but that's a different topic) because P4 a) can handle big files just fine and b) you don't really care about the history of the entire repository, but only about the part you're working on. For example personally i had my history tab display just the engine's code directory (and even then i rarely checked it since i don't really care what Joe working on the animation code did, my main interest was on the stuff i worked - and P4V showed me both if someone else is working on the same files i am and if my files have been modified, with easy GUI tools to see both diffs and the file's development history visually - the timeline feature is honestly great for that).

Perforce has some fundamental issues in how it works that creates problems, probably because of some deeply ingrained assumptions stemming from the 90s when it was first made that were never addressed, but it also has a lot of features (especially on the P4V GUI client) that makes working on a huge monolithic repository where everything goes in pretty much seamless.

Since you're here let me ask a question i had the last time i saw this project: how does your AI handle the ginormous SPEC.md file?[0] (last time i saw it Github was still able to display it :-P).

Are you feeding the entirety of it to Claude (i guess)? Doesn't that eat pretty much all context - and considering that (AFAIK) the spec file has everything about the OS, doesn't available context space put some sort of "hard ceiling" to what you can add to the OS?

[0] https://github.com/jggonz/os8088/blob/main/SPEC.md

FWIW "slop" seems to have become a more general slang nowadays, i see people use it on Discord and Twitch to describe all sorts of stuff often unrelated to AI.