I was invited by @pushcx, who I never met. Also, I’ve invited a few people who were strangers. Should I show myself out the door?

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Re position that you can’t be payed for it now, it’s not defendable … I think AI is cutting through all BS and we are just realizing that a huge mass of workforce was probably mostly doing useless things.

So … we can’t use the argument of continual employment against LLMs, but most jobs were useless to begin with? What do you expect to happen to all the people who will be no longer employed?

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LLMs have recently been used to reverse engineer old games and convert them to run on new hardware. This article goes into details about how to do that “by hand” so to speak.

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Pretty much. At my last job, in 12 years, I think I only looked into the history twice while tracking down a bug to see how it got introduced. Weird, [lead developer] wouldn’t have made this stupid of a mistake … oooh! It was the manager! (both times)

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Let it sit there loading for several minutes. It now says “the app failed to load — check your connection and reload” below (in large text) “Loading…” and an ever animated line. And I’m still receiving data.

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It’s even more fun when you have to support multiple floating point formats. I wrote an 8-bit assembler that supports IEEE-754 (because there’s a ROM that implements it for the 8-bit CPU), and the Microsoft Binary Format (because the BASIC that comes with the computer is from Microsoft, and it came out prior to IEEE-754 was standardized). Fun times.

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I checked C23, and nope, EB (erroneous behavior, I had to look this up) is considered UB (undefined behavior) per 3.5.3.

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A lawn maintenance robot [1]. One that could not only mow the lawn, but pull weeds (and triming the bushes would be a bonus, but not a requirement). With only two people living in the house, hand washing dishes wouldn’t be that much of a chore (as I already hand-wash most of the cooking tools since I use them so often).

[1] I live in South Florida. A xeriscape here (not necessarily in the “use less water” meaning, but more of a “use native vegetation”) would require turning our lawn into a flooded grassland (the Everglades) I don’t think our neighbors would appreciate that.

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The code I get from coding agents is better than code I can write myself. It’s better than most of the code I’ve seen from collaborators over the course of my career. I think it takes skill to get those results out of a coding agent,

So if you are weaker at programming than an LLM, why do you think you are better at prompting LLMs? There are skills required in either case, and from what I’ve read, it seems it requires just as much attention to detail to keep the LLM from going “off-script” and time that used to be spent getting code past the compiler (or unit tests) is now spent getting code past the LLM.

I can produce thousands of lines of good, tested, understood code in a day

Well, “good” and “understood” are doing some heavy lifting there. From what I’ve read, the moves made by AlphaZero (Google’s AI Go playing engine) are upsetting to Go masters because the moves are rarely understood by them. While AlphaZero plays by the rules, the “output” (so to speak) is so alien that it might as well be random moves that just happen to win. It’s hard to determine if the moves are good if the reasoning behind them are not understood.

On your coding thousands of lines of code, over the past forty years we’ve slowly hammered into upper management that “lines of code” is not a good metric, and now that’s suddenly tossed out the window and “more more more” is the mantra of the day? I thought “no code” was the best code.

Without a coding agent I tap out at a few hundred lines per day.

The last year at my previous job, I wrote less than 100 lines of code, and it wasn’t because I’m a slow typist. It wasn’t even because I wrote 10,000 lines then deleted 9,900 of them. No, it was the constant meetings that slowed the pace down for everybody!

score 1 · canonical

UB has nothing to do with supporting different hardware behaviour.

I thought some of UB was to deal with different CPU behavior. Some CPUs trap on signed overflow; others wrap. Some can do both, either by setting a flag (VAX) or instruction selection (MIPS). Some CPUs, when executing 1 << 100 do 100 rotates; other mask to the bit width of the type (8086 would do all rotates, 80286 started masking).

the compiler encounters some code, and assumes that UB does not happen

I hate that compilers assume that. I know that programmers don’t intentionally want to invoke UB in C, but there are so damn many footguns in C that I seriously doubt any non-trivial C program is completely UB free. And if a compiler can delete NULL checks in certain circumstance (<cough> <cough> GCC <cough>) that it at least should warn about it deleting a NULL check written by a programmer, but I’ve been told that such checks are beyond the ken of compiler writers for some obscure reason.

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The ANS Forth standard states that programs written to it must document what the program expects of “implementation specific behavior,” so I think it would be prudent for C programs to follow suit. And there are “implementation specific behavior” in C (character set used for source code, size of int, whether char is signed or unsigned, limitations on environment variables names, etc.).

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In C89, calling realloc(ptr,0) (assuming ptr had been allocated previously) would actually free the memory. This changed in C99, so realloc(ptr,0) would return a pointer to 0 bytes [1]. I think so many programs assumed the C89 behavior that the C99 behavior probably caught most programmers by surprise.

[1] What does allocating 0 bytes even mean? A valid pointer that can’t be used?

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Even if normally the variable is stored only in a register, memset_s() has to write to memory? Even if marked non-volatile?

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Unless the compiler handles calls to memset_s() specially so it “knows” to zero out the variable, regardless of where it lives (memory or registers). C compilers already can treat memset() (and memcpy(), memmove()) specially (when you include <string.h>) by inlining them or calling a function, depending upon the context.

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But, at this point, [JSON] has basically won.

Twenty years ago, XML won. XML was everywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if twenty years from now, something else has replaced JSON as a serialization format because of its annoying aspects.

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And speaking of overengineering bridges, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was not overengineered when first built. It did not end well. But that’s bridges. This is software. Was the Apollo Guidance Computer overengineered? Given how harrowing the Apollo 11 landing was, I don’t think so.

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The era of exponential CPU speed ups went from the 1950s to 2005, when CPU speeds generally capped out at 3GHz. Since then we’ve gotten more cores, but raw speed hasn’t changed that much.

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Have you run LLM-security audits against your LLM-assisted projects? Are they more secure overall?

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