- For those unaware, this line is from the movie Terminator 2:
- I clicked on the post expecting it to be something from T2 and wondered why I was reading something about emulation.
- That movie has aged incredibly well!
- 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.
- >Skynet becoming self-aware.
Did it? I thought Skynet was a defense system trained to see humans as enemies, it just worked by design, like HAL 9000. Screamers became self-aware.
- 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."
- Isn't that Accelerando?
- A major difference is that Blindsight is actually readable and enjoyable. Also, vampires in space.
- I haven't read Accelerando but I found Blindsight really difficult to read and like visualise what is going on.
It felt like he tried to jam way too many story threads into what is a reasonably short book too. The vampires are a good example of that.
- Same, it was a slog and difficult to figure out what was going on.
- Oof; I loved both books, but Accelerando was much easier to read.
- That thing is a bastardization of singularity sky for the masses
- Weird. I found Accelerando to be both.
- I'm reading it now and am enjoying it!
- "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."
- > But Terminator failed on a basic premise: Skynet becoming self-aware.
A strange claim. Why do you think that?
> The future seems more like …
Oh, so Terminator failed because it didn’t match a different fictional speculation about the future?
- 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.
- Near as I can tell, the LLMs aren’t the threat. Just greedy morons with too much power, same as usual.
- Good point. If only the evil we must fight was as simple as Skynet. Reality is much sadder since people are hurting people.
- > That movie has aged incredibly well!
Except for the titular event not happening!
- You know that's true of most films, right? "Aging well" doesn't refer to howly closely it matched reality.
- Resolution-wise it hasn't due to the extensive use of early CGI.
- 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.
- What do you mean? The cgi is great, even today. They obviously put a lot of work and effort into it
- 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.
- The ILM documentary on Disney+ talks about the techniques on that movie, super interesting documentary in general.
- That CGI looks quite OK, and even surpasses much of "modern" CGI. Have you ever seen "Flash"?
This is considering the effects were done in 1990.
Edit: a lot of what people think is CGI in T2 is actually NOT.
https://www.facebook.com/StanWinstonSchool/videos/bullet-hit...
- Some confuse style with quality.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1q986...
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)
- 'PowerPC DRC' appears to be the code in mame that translates PowerPC machine code into native host machine code (Dynamic Recompilation Core).
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/devices/cpu/...
- I thought it was about Renaud' song _Laisse béton_
- 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 blog mentions a Graphing Calculator. Not sure if it shares code, but macOS still ships with an app to draw graphs, Grapher.app
- 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/
Curvus Pro: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/curvus-pro
- Thanks for sharing the links. Love this part!
“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.”
- Just wow! I’m speechless! Can’t think of any other word than “legendary”.
- 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)
- 403 forbidden
- 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 also see that error code, from Europe.
Perhaps it blocks any non-USA connection.
- Works in Spain though, so maybe depends on country. Romania is frequently blocked for example, even if Spain isn't.
- No, not work in Spain, or at least not from cellular
- Well, maybe more accurate "No, not for me" as I literally just stated it does work for at least me, and I'm in Spain :)
Seems we can conclude it may or may not work in Spain, maybe depending on the ISP? I'm on Vodafone FWIW.
- is there a match on?
- Not even on Cloudflare it seems, so the joke doesn't even work FWIW :/
- I could load it with Tor Browser
- Singapore - 223.119.20.232
- I also get 403 Forbidden, from EU, nothing special about my setup
- Works for me fine
- "You forgot to say please"
- "I does not boot and it makes me sad"
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.
- Codex overuses the word "quickly". I'm tempted to check what happens if I tell him to do it slowly.
- 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.
- It's bittersweet, isn't it. Software is solved, but at a terrible cost.
- How is it solved? LLMs cannot think new things, they can only cobble something together if it's in their training set.
- New things are made by cobbling together existing things.
- 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.
- I am not sure if claude had powerpc scripts in its training.
- That "only" part used to be the hardest. Getting the ideas was never the hard part. I think someone here even wrote an essay on that.
- 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..
- Out of curiousity, can you share a human invention that is not merely scaling things that were decades or centuries old at the time?
Fire? The wheel? Archimedes screw, maaaaybe?
- Electricity, RF communication, LASERS, Transistors....
- What specific inventions in those areas?
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 would put it differently. Those inventions came from humans interacting with the physical world.
When LLMs were first introduced, they didn't have much of a feedback loop. They wrote code, but they couldn't compile it. Not surprisingly, the code had bugs.
Now, they run with harnesses that allow them to compile the code, and react to the issues they observe. They can fix their own bugs and solve problems that they create, just like humans.
Give an agent access to the physical world, and it seems highly likely that they will be able to "invent" things based on feedback they receive while working towards goals.
Of course, there are some well-known limitations of LLMs, one of the biggest being that they're pretrained. So there may be some things where they're not as good. Just like how some humans aren't as good at certain tasks, depending on their genetics and/or how they've been trained.
- Those are the specific inventions.
- Those are not merely scaling. I can get “build upon other works”, but there’s a lot of scientific insights needed for observing and modeling a phenomena. It may even requires a boost of creativity to theorize an effect based on that model and then make it possible in an experiment.
- I take it that your training cutoff was early 2023.
- the trope that everyone else you are talking to on the Internet is a bot is getting tiring real fast
- I wasn't saying you were a bot.
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.
- Honestly conflating coding with typing tells me your idea of coding is very different to what I used to do.
- 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.
- > apply charitable reading and I'm sure even you could understand what I mean here.
Beautiful burn.
- 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.
- Yes you have to understand when the log stuck in CNC machine, if you want to put the carpentry analogy to its extreme.
- 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"
- The real problem is we built the genie in the lamp or the monkey's paw: it's a machine that gives you what you ask for!
- 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.
- The cost is not terrible, calm down.
- Asta la vista baby
- Hasta* (it’s spanish)
- It doesn't sound like it has an H at the beginning. Shame it hasta be like that.
- Spanish:
- "ha" sound -> J
- silent -> H, sometimes LL
- "yu" sound -> LL
- "v" sound -> B
La Jolla -> "Lah Hoya" (English phonetic).
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.
- You missed the joke.
- The H is silent in Austrian-Spanish.
- A number of English and French speakers will drop their H’s.
- Conversely, I’ve heard British people pronounce “HMS” with the H, i.e. “haytch em ess”. Sounds very odd to my American ears.
- Not all British people accept that pronunciation. I highly recommend this sketch:
- They speak Spanish in Austria?
- They have to; the Kangaroos only understand Spanish sadly.
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