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Cake day: May 19th, 2024

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  • This is about the extinction of hand coded programming as we know it. You know how very few people know assembly, and every so often a COBOL expert has to be found to update a bank’s database so they can overhaul their systems?

    What if all of programming becomes like that only worse. With new generations of programmers not actually knowing how to program. A massive decline in numbers and competence… Programmers that only “program” by talking to LLMs.

    Ever seen an episode of Star Trek where a computer is in charge of everything, and society crumbles when it breaks down?

    I think we might hit a plateau in a generation or two. The point at which we can generate more and more LLMs but don’t know how to make them any better. Let alone reprogram unrelated systems like medical scanners, or air traffic safety systems, or mapping systems.

    “It’s okay we’ll have the LLMs improve the LLMs”… For the rest of eternity.



  • Or rather, LLMs helped create bad code, and so didn’t do a significant peice of work - or did it so poorly it was dangerous to rely on for general use in an Operating system:

    Race conditions in programming occur when multiple processes or threads attempt to modify and access shared data simultaneously, leading to unpredictable and unintended outcomes. They can result in data corruption, program failures, and other unexpected behaviors if not properly managed with synchronization techniques.

    The work isn’t done if it’s introducing risky/bad code (especially at the level of an operating system). That’s like saying “LLMs cure cancer by cutting patients into quarters, human reviewers stop it”

    Then someone claiming “the real story here is that LLMs cured cancer”.

    Was cancer actually cured? The article doesn’t say the problem was fixed by the LLM. It says humans did the work of finalizing parts of it which had to be restricted to an experimental branch, and only operates on 64-bit machines.