I have strong affinity for having references popping into my mind when doing something not obviously related. Sometimes the connection is obscure, sometimes the source of the reference is obscure. I highly doubt people would get many of them.
One of my favorite ones is "Third turtle lies.". When people wonder how something reported could have been possible.
As a story, yes. But Terminator failed on a basic premise: Skynet becoming self-aware.
The future seems more like Blindsight [1]: hyper-intelligent, completely unconscious systems outperform, out-manipulate, and out-compete human beings purely through automated efficiency.
I don't have much of a problem with becoming self aware. More questionable is hooking up AI to launch nukes - you wouldn't want to do that with Claude. There's also the time travel thing.
Skynet becomes self aware. From T2:
"The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th."
"No, nobody forced me to get the rewire. I could have just let them cut out my brain and pack it into Heaven, couldn't I? That's the choice we have. We can be utterly useless, or we can try and compete against the vampires and the constructs and the AIs. And perhaps you could tell me how to do that without turning into a—an utter freak."
We are in "the future" relative to both works. The current intelligence threatening our planet is an unconscious token predictor, much more like the hostile non-entity in Blindsight (which even speaks to humans via token prediction) than the mechanical persons in Terminator 2.
Careful! Some of the scenes you would think as CGI are actually using practical effects. Even a couple of scenes with liquid metal on screen were using models.
T2 and Abyss were trailblazers. I remember on the T2 director’s commentary how they were so amazed when they got the effects back months later because they’d never seen anything so good.
There was a lot of cartoon animation done by hand in the 1930. Frame by frame drawn, far superior to modern animation. However the styles are different, and some prefer one style of animation over another.
I've just noticed in the 'full version' linked to in the reddit comments, it's a poorly done 480i -> 480p, and the interlace fields are reversed.
If you watch the panning in the original star-scape at the start of the video, you'll see it jittering back and forth as it pans. Sad. If properly converted to 480p, that scene would be super-smooth too.
(It's less apparent elsewhere, unless there is side-scrolling)
I am doing a very similar thing right now, which is adding a JIT to both Basilisk and SheepShaver: https://github.com/rcarmo/macemu - on the PPC side, we're still poking at some hardware registers that the Quadra ROMs like to noodle in.
The app on your Mac today isn't a rewrite of the legendary Mac OS 7.2.1 Graphing Calculator, but an acquired app based on Curvus Pro introduced in OSX Tiger.
The first one has a legendary backstory.
2 devs snuck into Apple after their project was canceled:
https://www.pacifict.com/Story/
This highlights what I think is missing within a lot of tech companies today. I don’t know too many people who are so passionate about what they’re doing that they would sneak into their former employer’s office buildings and then find employees willing to work together with them to finish a project that simply had to get done. That alone makes me a bit sad.
“We looked at each other, took a deep breath, and launched the application. The monitor burst into flames. We calmly carried it outside to avoid setting off smoke detectors, plugged in another monitor, and tried again.”
Grapher.app is different from Graphing Calculator. It came via an acquisition. All the details are here if you want to read the backstory (assuming the info is correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapher)
Feels like it might be pertinent to share more details than simply the error code. What country? How are you connecting? Anything out of the ordinary with your setup that might be the cause?
I actually write prompts like that when I'm not under pressure. Claude will sometimes completely ignore your feelings, and sometimes give a little comment, which I just find refreshing in the middle of otherwise often boring sessions. And it does not have an effect on the actual result.
Crazy theory: Maybe Codex watched too many YouTube videos. I have noticed on YouTube that many younger narrators say, "I quickly did X," when "I did X" would have been more just as well and usually more truthful. Why did you have to _quickly_ cut that piece of wood when the video clearly shows cutting it at a perfectly normal speed?
Also, please try not to anthropomorphize LLMs, they hate it when you do that.
They can think and reason better than most humans. Most problems they're pointed at are not in their training set, but in certain ways they resemble things that are—maybe there are a few different resemblances to different problems in its training set—so it's able to pull these disparate similarities together and apply the patterns it finds to come up with a solution. Much like human brains do.
What? This is a massive misunderstanding. It’s easy to get truly novel ideas from LLMs, unless your definition of “new things” is so strict that no human can do so either.
The training set is about patterns, not facts or specific configurations. Yes, it’s possible to extract (some) of the training set verbatim, but that doesn’t mean it’s all you can do.
>unless your definition of “new things” is so strict that no human can do so either.
Humans rarely think of new things. We're a weak hivemind species. One or two individuals figure something out, and the rest of the troop of monkeys imitates. Brains are too fuel hungry for every brain to be innovating, "innovate and copy to the other brains" is the norm.
It does not think at all. It vibes based on its training and any additional bolted on constraints. It is a quite simple automation that only works by huge amount of existing data.
Modern man has grown quite dumb. He only seems to be able to "invent" by massive scaling things that are decades or centuries old..
Electricity runs from simple batteries (600 BCE) to today’s power grids.
RF was predicted but not demonstrated by Maxwell in the 1860’s. His work built on Faraday’s (1840’s) and Coulomb’s (1780’s). Coulomb built on Franklin and Newton, among others. Or do you mean Marconi and Tesla, who merely implemented what Maxwell predicted?
The same is true for lasers and transistors but it’s tedious. There was no single “back in the day people invented things from whole cloth” moment.
I was pointing out two things: first, your understanding of LLM capabilities is very outdated; and second, that in this respect, you're behaving much like an LLM with a training cutoff.
That further touches on the idea that the differences between you and an LLM may not be as large as you imagine. In particular, "cobbling something together if it's in their training set" is pretty much what all humans do.
Software isn't solved. 'Coding' is, according to the people of Claude.
Coding (programming) is a tedious and expensive part of software engineering. There's other parts AI isn't doing, such as understanding and refining requirements, and delivery + accountability.
> Coding (programming) is a tedious and expensive part of software engineering.
Why is that? Coding, for me, is kinda relaxing, and the fun part of developing software. Gathering requirements, especially in a corporate settings, is the tedious part and the most time consuming.
Why is it bittersweet? Carpenters probably didn't cry when their tools improved.
It will be bittersweet when there's no human needed at the wheel but IMHO we are far, far from that. These models/agents are just mimicking human text and need guidance because they often get lost or stuck.
Carpenters would have cried if all their work was reduced to shoving the logs into CNC machines.
Yes there is still human input but it requires comparatively no skill or depth and it gets easier by the month. If I were lobotimized today I'd still be able to function as half-assed architect to AIs anyway.
When was the last time you read fighting distractions/getting "in the zone"/complaint about open space offices thread or comment? They used to be a weekly feature on HN frontpage.
> Yes there is still human input but it requires comparatively no skill or depth and it gets easier by the month. If I were lobotimized today I'd still be able to function as half-assed architect to AIs anyway.
Hard doubt, software engineering is so much more than just literal coding and typing. At least for many of us, the coding/typing part is the easy stuff, everything around that is where the actual engineering happens. If I were lobotomized, maybe I'd get ~10% done today as the day before, if I'm lucky. Even with my full mental capabilities, the agents end up on wild goose-chases unless I'm very specific with what I want, and even sometimes ignoring things if they're too complicated/takes too long, so a bit of thinking is still required to get the right prompts.
And considering how subjective programming is, since it's a creative endeavour after all, I'm not that worried somehow all programmers will be unemployed in just some years.
> When was the last time
Frequency of something doesn't tell you how big of an issue something is, for all we know, HN community (or even the moderators) could have been tired of all the circular conversations where nothing new is being said, and downvote it. Doesn't really tell us much.
Use whatever labels you want, apply charitable reading and I'm sure even you could understand what I mean here. Clearly there are at least two sorts of tasks (or used to anyways) in "software engineering" as a whole, one more mechanical and one more about thinking.
Coding is literally writing code, instructions in plain text that control the behavior of computer. That implies knowing which instructions to write.
But creating software is much more than that. Just like writing an essay involves more than just typing words. Other activities include: Architecture, Requirements analysis, Debugging, Testing, Integration,…
But it's not like "shoving the logs into CNC machines". You have to understand what they are doing and point them into the right direction. LLMs very often lack common sense once you move out of easy things.
I love programming CNC machines; I am a terrible carpenter. Someone still has to tell the LLMs what to build, specify design constraints and goals, etc
I think carpenters might cry if a company went around shoving every single piece of carpentry they could find into a machine, and then when you press a button on that machine, a chair comes out, and then they go around saying that this machine will replace carpenters forever, and they made this machine with no help from other carpenters, and furniture makers all went "who needs carpenters anymore, lets just use the chair machine"
This reminds me of the Go champion who announced he was giving up the game after a computer beat him.
It’s as if a runner were to give up running when beaten by a horse or a car. It suggests they may have had unexamined and perhaps somewhat strange reasons for doing the activity in the first place.
People have difficulty accepting just how significant their limitations actually are. We design our world to hide those limitations. As an example, it would be easy to make computer games that are unwinnable by humans because of our slow reaction times, low speed in general, and our cognitive limitations. But no-one makes such games, because few people would want to play them for very long.
The “terrible cost” in this specific case seems to be related to discovering that we were fooling ourselves about how good we were at software development.
Vallejo -> "Baiyeho" (phonetic), though the north-bay California town is often pronounced "Valayho" by locals. "Vallay-joe" is a sure sign of a non-native.
I have it on good authority that mail addressed to "La Hoya, CA" will in fact reach its intended destination.