> If my school's library had had Machine Code for Beginners, my career might have been very different. (I'm actually a bit annoyed; I didn't know that existed).
It's actually very good. I remember reading it at age 11 or so, and coming away knowing much more low-level stuff about computers than even the 18yo in the final year of school who were literally studying the stuff.
Things like "each instruction is a number", and registers like the PC, overflow, etc.
I went through a period (and a forest of pages) trying to write an entire game in machine code alone (with a small basic shim to load it).
I can't really think of a suitable one TBH; Python's completely out of the running, Java and C# have a lot of unnecessary (for this goal) boilerplate, Pascal is not a bad choice.
Maybe Javascript? The books can then instruct "type this into an HTML file".
In my mind, a more modern platform would be a simulated one that has its own machine language (byte-code compiled, perhaps) so that these books, which take you all the way into machine language, would make sense.
[picture of Tips Kitty] Don't forget! Every time you see " ⦙ " in the listing, press the [Tab] key on your keyboard. See page 23 to learn why this is important.
And page 23 teaches you about significant whitespace, and how to configure several text editors that a kid's likely to have available to actually show it like that. Heck, I use Panic's Nova for my text editing and it does that out of the box with no configuration needed.
> [picture of Tips Kitty] Don't forget! Every time you see " ⦙ " in the listing, press the [Tab] key on your keyboard. See page 23 to learn why this is important.
I don't think you actually used those books :-/
No one linearly writes code, from the start of the file to the end; they edit it. They move blocks around if they missed a page, they navigate around putting in missing if statements and removing incorrectly-added loops. Those programs were very much not one-and-done, they were heavily modified by the kids.
Your proposal of "Tell them to configure their editor for Python" and "add in unicode symbols to represent whitespace" is the exact opposite of what those books were about.
The books were about removing superfluous barriers, not adding them! Using Python would result in a whole lot of incidental complexity for literally no gain.
I never used the Usborne books because I was a US kid but I sure typed in a lot of stuff from books and magazines for my c64, often while modifying it on the fly. And dealing with accidentally skipped pages. And went on to learn assembly language.
Python is also already all over the Raspberry Pi and MicroPython/CircuitPython spheres, so there's an easy road into SBCs and microcontrollers.
Education has already chosen Python as the preferred language for this sort of thing. It has some unfortunate bits, but it's certainly a more ergonomic language than BASIC. Counting tabs is less arduous than messing with line numbers and GOSUB.
I spent much time carefully typing these things in (spy games, horror games, etc), then even more time designing my own adventure games after reading the adventure titles.
it absolutely doesn’t. most software is shitty and buggy. I know, have seen 30 years worth of it. just now we can write the shitty and buggy a lot faster.
ask anyone that has been in the industry for awhile and they will tell you the same thing. a lot of crowd on HN write as if human-written code is any good and while there are always exception, on average, most software is shitty. if I had a dollar for every time I met someone writing software for “X” saying “dude, if you knew what I know you’d never use/do/… X” I’d be a very rich man
But, lets start with the C compiler written by an AI, guided by the comp[any that sells the AI. Do you really think that the average user is eady yet to accept that sort of degradation in quality?
who is revolting? still waiting for an example of this ficticious, unfortunately often-cited fantasy… if the example is C compiler no one uses (no one even spent serious time trying to make it work either) the bar is waaaay to low for your line of thinking IMHO
“Biggest innovation in tech” at times feels like 2000 era Nokia smartphones. You got phone with circle keyboard! You got foldable phone that turns into a neat camcorder! You got mp3 player phone!
All with marginal value add and having more to do with fashion than with actual innovation.
Real innovation is synonymous with problem solving. The only problem tech industry is solving nowadays is keeping its bloated valuation afloat.
In my mind, LLMs have strong parallels with self-driving vehicles. Both are impressive tech innovations with amazing future potential, and both have no shortage of evangelists that have claimed that the future is already here. Both have a swath of average joes trusting them with their lives and livelihoods, while those with enough technical knowledge realize that both can fail in unexpected and sometimes catastrophic fashion and won't use either without significant babysitting.
The primary difference I've noticed, however, is that the AI evangelists also have a flair for painting a picture where everyone's jobs are eliminated, while many CEOs are already using it as an excuse for layoffs.
I can see no reason why there'd be any negativity about AI.
I guess that depends on how old you are. The internet itself is a strong contender for being a bigger innovation. And the web. The personal computer. Smart phones, and even cell phones in general. Oh, I almost forgot GPS. And that is all just in the arena of personal computing/devices. Get outside of tech and bring in science, and we're in a completely different world.
I mean, yes, LLMs are an innovation. But outside of the tech industry, they are not having anywhere near the impact on people's lives as many other inventions.
Yet. The Internet was not impactful for the average person for many years. It took a long time for even half the population to get Internet access, and it took a long time for the Web to be developed
A carpenter can build a house with commercially produced dimensional lumber without having to harvest the trees, cut them into boards of standard dimensions, kiln-dry it, and transport it to the building site. We still say he "built" the house.
At some point, though, it's fair to ask "what did I add?"
If you are directing other people (or maybe robots, someday) to do the actual building, you can't really claim to have "built a house" even though it all happened under your direction.
I guess bottom line for me to feel I had a real part in "building" a thing would be whether I added anything I am specifically qualified or skilled at doing, or did I do what anyone could have done?
I plant a seed, a human being carries it to fruition for 9 months through her determination, love and literal life blood, and I can claim I brought the seed to life.
He plants an idea and patiently coaxes a machine to spit out the code that matches it, you're giving the machine the credit.
If he was constraining the AI's output, his input was meaningful.
Did you ever bring anything to life? Whatever it is, you are also relying on the work others have done before you and standing on the shoulders of giants.
It's so easy to have an LLM generate your blog post without meandering in circles and without all the LLM tells, so why not do it?
I mean, honestly, there are really only two options here:
1. You don't know how to "tune" the LLM output, or
2. The LLM output can't be tuned.
Either one means that you should probably write your own thoughts and not have a probabilistic generator create this word-salad that I found extremely hard to follow!
It just struck me that a likely end-result of AIs are the Discworld elves:
> Elves have no proper imagination or real emotions, and therefore such things fascinate them. Because they cannot create they steal musicians and artists [... snipped ...] Even if an elf is, for reasons of its own, trying to be nice, its lack of understanding of humans mean there's always something "off" about it.
I am very uncomfortable with the idea of "this person or system cannot create, they can only steal". It seems very dehumanizing, and though LLMs aren't humans I could see the argument very easily turned on people. There is nothing specific to LLMs in it.
The people filling the wires with AI content they didn't write aren't fundamentally incapable of creation; they have chosen not to do it, and so are incapable only until they make a better choice.
It's not dehumanising to see the output of someone who isn't creating as uncreative.
> They support Windows, which is many millions of lines of code not written by the current maintainers.
All of which was battle-tested on millions, if not billions, of devices over 40 years. The new Bun is effectively a different project than it was a month ago, with next to no prod use.
I have no problem having a dependency on a 40 year/billions of use software, I do have misgivings about a dependency on a project that has never been used in prod, and was only written last week.
It's actually very good. I remember reading it at age 11 or so, and coming away knowing much more low-level stuff about computers than even the 18yo in the final year of school who were literally studying the stuff.
Things like "each instruction is a number", and registers like the PC, overflow, etc.
I went through a period (and a forest of pages) trying to write an entire game in machine code alone (with a small basic shim to load it).
It's a very approachable book.
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