nosianu

I wrote assembler on pages of paper. Then I used tables, and a calculator for the two's-complement relative negative jumps, to manually translate it into hex code. Then I had software to type in such hex dumps and save them to audio cassette, from which I could then load them for execution.

I did not have an assembler for my computer. I had a disassembler though- manually typed it in from a computer magazine hex dump, and saved it on an audio cassette. With the disassembler I could check if I had translated everything correctly into hex, including the relative jumps.

The planning required to write programs on sheets of paper was very helpful. I felt I got a lot dumber once I had a PC and actual programmer software (e.g. Borland C++). I found I was sitting in front of an empty code file without a plan more often than not, and wrote code moment to moment, immediately compiling and test running.

The AI coding may actually not be so bad if it encourages people to start with high-level planning instead of jumping into the IDE right away.

> Weeks after it was exposed that Hamas’ so-called “Gaza Health Ministry” has been circulating false casualty figures, much of the media are still reporting them without a hint of skepticism.

> In April, research by Salo Aizenberg, a board member of HonestReporting, revealed that thousands of previously “identified” deaths — including more than 1,000 children allegedly killed in Israeli airstrikes — had quietly disappeared from Hamas’ own tallies.

> Aizenberg’s findings echoed a December report by the Henry Jackson Society, which documented how Hamas had systematically inflated civilian casualty numbers to suggest that Israel targets non-combatants.

Not that old big non-AI software doesn't have similar maintainability issues (I keep posting this example, but I don't actually want to callthat company out specifically, the problem is widespread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941).

That's why I'm reluctant to complain about the AI code issues too much. The problem of how software is written, on the higher level, the teams, the decisions, the rotating programmers, may be bigger than that of any particular technology or person actually writing the code.

I remember a company where I looked at a contractor job, they wanted me to fix a lot of code they had received from their Eastern European programmers. They complained about them a lot in our meeting. However, after hearing them out I was convinced the problem was not the people generating the code, but the ones above them who failed to provide them with accurate specs and clear guidance, and got surprised at the very end that it did not work as expected.

Similar with AI. It may be hard to disentangle what is project management, what is actually the fault of the AI. I found that you can live with pockets of suboptimal but mostly working code well enough, even adding features and fixing bugs easily, if the overall architecture is solid, and components are well isolated.

That is why I don't worry too much about the complaints here about bad error checks and other small stuff. Even if it is bad, you will have lots of such issues in typical large corporate projects, even with competent people. That's because programmers keep changing, management focuses on features over anything else (usually customers, internal or external, don't pay for code reorg, only for new features). The layers above the low level code are more important in deciding if the project is and remains viable.

From what the commenters say, it seems to me the problem starts much higher than the Claude code, so it is hard to say how much at fault AI generated code actually is IMHO. Whether you have inexperienced juniors or an AI producing code, you need solid project lead and architecture layers above the lines of code first of all.

https://orf.at/stories/3417584/

I doubt Trump would have ever even thought of Greenland on his own. I think was told about it, and the narrative planted in his head deliberately.

This focus on "Trump" in Internet comments and media irks me to no end. Trump is not a failure and not the wrong person in the job - he is ideal for those behind him. The money does not like public attention.

The theories proposed here are merely examples of human brains ability to come up with a fantastic story for anything in the absence of data. Ex falso quodlibet - from zero follows everything, if you have nothing you can just say anything you want, and it will "explain" your non-existing data perfectly /s

The extremely narrow passages, only one exit, bad air circulation, there is nothing that hints towards this being used for hiding, quite the opposite.

> And while three brave explorers in the 21st century once spent 48 hours in an erdstall, crawling to new sections whenever oxygen became scarce, it seems unlikely that they would have been constructed as hiding places, even temporary ones

You do not point that out every. Single. Time. somebody argues even though it is true, or do you? Because that is just too shallow, that is the basis, nothing can be below that, so there is no point in pointing to the ground every time. So when you do point it out, it is YOU who has an agenda.

You are trying to shift the framing.

Supply curve??? The OP wrote "This is confirming demand is more inelastic"

I wrote

> Isn't the only thing that could matter ... if the margins are big enough

2) No, the standard price elasticity of demand curve does not directly include profits. It primarily models the relationship between price and quantity demanded.

If you add that information, if you really think it adds any value, after discussing what's actually in the study the comment would be sooo much better.

Isn't the only thing that could matter - apart from strategic considerations of financing a loss for a time - if the margins are big enough? Who wants to pay for people to take their products below the full cost of making them, apart from some investor-financed hype startups?

Great - neither did I!

Not a single word about any internals anywhere in sight in my comment!!

Apart from "Solaris", which many probably know because there's been a reasonably well-known movie, I recommend "Fiasco" by the same author, Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by Stanisław Lem. Spoiler: It does not end well. The aliens are too alien, and the humans do what humans often do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_(novel)

LLMs are trained on our intercepted communication - and even then only the formal part that uses words.

When a human forms sentences it is from a deep model of the real world. Okay, people are also capable of talking about things they don't actually know, they have only read about, in which case they have a superficial understanding and unwarranted confidence similar to AI...

What on earth??? There is not a trace in that statement that fist that description! Stop making stuff up that is not there. The text is right in front of you, no need to invent words never said or written.

> Under no circumstance should boys or men be held accountable for their actions.

Even more insane. None of that is anywhere in that sentence, not even with an "interpretation".

In threads like these, some people are reacting to the shadows found in their own mind.

Why don't you just stick to the mentioned statement? "Adams opined that society leaves parents of troubled teenage boys with only two options: to either watch people die or murder their own son." Nothing you said can be found in there. That is all something you added ("interpreted" does not quite fit it when you hallucinate something new entirely into existence).

I don't know, I conclude the opposite. If you need accurate color reproduction when you publish online, you are doing something wrong.

I used to co-own a small digital printing business, so I'm aware of what all of it means, and I had an appropriate monitor myself and a paid Adobe Design Suite subscription.

But for the web, when our setup is too good it's actually a detriment. It is predictable that you end up publishing things that require your quality setup. There is a good reason not to bother with a high quality monitor usable for serious publishing and photo/video editing when you only do web thing. Which is exactly why when I bought my last monitor, which is for business work and coding and web browsing and other mundane things, I deliberately ignored all the very high quality displays, even though the company would have paid whatever I chose. It is not an advantage for that use case.

I don't get it, I have medically tested 120% color vision (it was a lengthy test), definitely nothing wrong on my side, so I don't understand at all what the designers and coders are seeing that they think that that is a great idea. The difference between the pixels is objectively bad, one can take a screenshot and look at the background versus text pixels.

Maybe, just maybe, this may have some thing to do with the potential damages???

Here in Germany we still have safety checks for boar meat and mushrooms, decades after Chernobyl! (https://www.bjv-ffb.de/jagdpraxis/7286-2/)

You can say the same for cars, houses, appliances, medical devices, elevators, stairs, disabled access, etc etc.

So, what exactly is your point? Yes, everything would be "much cheaper" if nobody had to pay as much attention to most details any more. Everything would also be much much more expensive for everybody else and longer term, or not work at all or reliably or safely.

I'm making this assumption based on how utterly useless it is to try to have a serious discussion that's really about that old car vs. a new one. I mean, would anyone even think about producing those same old cars with their old technology? Obviously not.

I think, in my discussions, not just this one, it would help us all A LOT if we didn't try to win an argument and limit ourselves to interpret the other people's comments in the most restricting way. Let's assume we are here to learn something other than finding ways to be "technically correct".

The "script" is compiled all the way down to machine code by the runtime, for heavily used paths. The black/white distinction of "scripted" vs. "compiled" does not exist, has not for many years.

Too many of these discussions and arguments seem to be stuck in the 1990s technology level. It is much more mixed and complex now.

From the abstract:

> The use of uranyl acetate, a staining agent successfully used for decades in electron microscopy of biological specimens, is now strictly regulated by law due to its toxicity and radioactivity. It is even banned in some laboratories. In the meantime, there are a number of substitutes on the market, none of which comes close to the very good staining results of uranyl acetate, or only partially, and some of which are also toxic. In this paper, two alternatives to uranyl acetate are presented, namely coffee, which is used in countless households, and pure chlorogenic acid, which is a component of coffee.

I used the ChatGPT web interface for this one-off task.

Input: A D96A INVOIC text message. Here is what those look like, a short example, the one I had was much larger with multiple invoices and tens of thousands of items: https://developer.kramp.com/edi-edifact-d96a-invoic

The result is not code but a transformed file. This exact scenario can be made into code easily though by changing the request from "do this" to "provide a [Python|whatever] script to do this". Internally the AI produces code and runs it, and gives you the result. You actually make it do less work if you just ask for the script and to not run them.

Only what I said. I had to ask for some corrections because it made a few mistakes in code interpretations.

> (message uploaded as file)

> Analyze this D.96A message

> This message contains more than one invoice, you only parsed the first one

(it finds all 27 now)

> The invoice amount is in segment "MOA+77". See https://www.publikationen.gs1-germany.de/Complete/ae_schuhe/... for a list of MOA codes (German - this is a German company invoice).

> Invoice 19 is a "credit note", code BGM+381. See https://www.gs1.org/sites/default/files/docs/eancom/ean02s4/... for a list of BGM codes, column "Description" in the row under "C002 DOCUMENT/MESSAGE NAME"

> Generate Excel report

> No. Go back and generate a detailed Excel report with all details including the line items, with each invoice in a separate sheet.

> Create a variant: All 27 invoices in one sheet, with an additional column for the invoice or credit note number

> Add a second sheet with a table with summary data for each invoice, including all MOA codes for each invoice as a separate column

The result was an Excel file with an invoice per worksheet, and meta data in an additional sheet.

Similarly, by simply doing what I wrote above, at the start telling the AI to not do anything but to instead give me a Python script, and similar instructions, I got a several hundred lines ling Python script that processed my collected DESADV EDI messages in XML format ("Process a folder of DESADV XML files and generate an Excel report.")

If I had had to actually write that code myself, it would have taken me all day and maybe more, mostly because I would have had to research a lot of things first. I'm not exactly parsing various format EDI messages every day after all. For this, I wrote a pretty lengthy and very detailed request though, 44 long lines of text, detailing exactly which items with which path I wanted from the XML, and how to name and type them in the result-Excel.

ChatGPT Query: https://pastebin.com/1uyzgicx

Result (Python script): https://pastebin.com/rTNJ1p0c

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

It's not just about them (link, Oracle), there is terrible code all over the place. Games, business software, everything.

It has nothing to do with the language! Anyone who claims that may be part of the problem, since they don't understand the problem and concentrate on superficial things.

Also, what looks terrible may not be so. I once had to work on an in-house JS app (for internal cost reporting and control). It used two GUI frameworks - because they had started switching to another one, but then stopped the transition. Sounds bad, yes? But, I worked on the code of the company I linked above, and that "terrible" JS app was easy mode all the way!

Even if it used two GUI frameworks at once, understanding the code, adding new features, debugging, everything was still very easy and doable with just half a brain active. I never had to ask my predecessor anything either, everything was clear with one look at the code. Because everything was well isolated and modular, among other things. Making changes did not affect other places in unexpected ways (as is common in biology).

I found some enlightenment - what seems to be very bad at first glance may not actually matter nearly as much as deeper things.

If that is an example for how your usual comments look like, I can assure you it has nothing to do with whether you criticize capitalism or not. A low-effort single-sentence mood statement is just not a good fit for the site.

I'm not sure if NYT articles are known to change their images and captions for different viewers? I checked the archived link too.

> “All you could smell was sulfur hydrogen, and you cannot breathe,” Dr. Vrenozi said, recalling that most of the researchers were wearing masks. But as they descended deeper into the cave, she said that “you get used to the smell of spoiled eggs.”

Also, you use "" but you are not quoting, the text inside your quotes does not exist in the article. The actual quote would be

> The cave is hard to reach and is filled with foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide gas, in concentrations too great for most animals to live there.

> You can’t kill/arrest 25% of your population.

Unnecessary.

> That is why Russia/China/etc are so scared to let any protests begin

Especially Russia's issue is that lots of the elites want change too. But you also underestimate that what the population also does not want is a repeat of 1990s chaos, and Russian weakness.