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points by mapontosevenths 15 hours ago | 0 comments

> "That almost nobody has the skills these days to implement something like TP is something we could eventually come to regret – or, rather, our grandchildren could. Software development is becoming a semi-skilled industry, and I doubt that the rise of AI will entirely compensate for this."

I agree, but AI also there is hope!

For many years I've worried about the ever-growing depth of abstraction in computing. There are few alive now who actually understand all of the layers on abstraction involved in modern computing, and who can debug the truly strange edge case bugs and vulnerabilities introduced by the interoperation of these many complex layers.

For a time I imagined it to be an unsolvable problem, and that there would always be only a special class of neurodivergent hyper-specialists who still mostly had to work in large teams to even come close to understanding a stack in full. We're reaching the point where a single human lifespan just isn't enough to learn it all, even for those of us with what Dilbert called "The Knack". By the time you're proficient in all of it - you're dead.

Now there is a new kind of intelligence. One that CAN fit it all in a single mind, and one that will outlive us all and continue to learn long after our meat has gone bad.

As long as the AI's stay aligned, and we find ways to build them more efficiently there's a non-zero chance that they actually make it all better instead of worse. Genuinely long-term planning and the ability to TRULY grasp the full stack COULD actually happen. At least if we use these new systems in service of the greater good, and not just to play silly games on the stock market.

[–] mike_hearn 13 hours ago

AI isn't fundamentally different to us and it does benefit from abstractions. So, I don't think that's going to happen.

Besides, it's an exaggeration. I've been programming for 35 years, and Turbo Pascal was one of my first languages. I wrote OWL code! Seeing that splash screen brought back memories. But I can understand and debug problems that cross almost any layer of the software stack. Anything from some ReactJS library to kernel code to UEFI. I'm now 42 so the idea nobody can understand or debug interactions across layers before they die is for the birds. The stack isn't that deep.

[–] enneff 10 hours ago

I think it’s easier for us to say when we grew up with the stack. In the old days you could pretty much understand everything on your computer in a relatively short period of time. So as a learner it was all so accessible. These days it’s hard to even know where to start.

[–] herf 14 hours ago

AI is not trending towards small, minimal code with nice abstractions. It is faster at replicating "big team" code, but the code from a small team or a few authors still wins for elegance and simplicity.

[–] iugtmkbdfil834 14 hours ago

I suppose it depends on what you mean by trending. Some of the recent rewrite news[1] for example suggest that, at minimum, it is the macro demand that is driving the software trends. In this case, issues with memory supply drive attempts at more sensible memory utilization.

[1]https://tech-insider.org/discord-electron-rust-gpui-rebuild-...

[–] BadlyDrawnBoy 14 hours ago

>https://tech-insider.org/discord-electron-rust-gpui-rebuild-...

The fact that we are celebrating that a chat app only uses 300MB ram at launch instead of 1GB seems absolutely ludicrous to me

The early versions of Skype used about 30MB RAM while in a video call and by the early 2000s standards it was bloatware. Before that we used WebEx in the 90s which was a browser ActiveX or Java applet and RAM use was about 6MB in a video call. In the early / mid 90s I used CU-SeeMe for video calls and its RAM footprint was just over 2MB on Mac System 7

Something has clearly gone very wrong in the software development process in the last 2-3 decades and while Im encouraged to see that some people are interested in reversing that trend I still find the resource wastage has me shaking my head sometimes

[–] mike_hearn 13 hours ago

A lot of that RAM is just high resolution bitmaps. You can have apps that fit in 10MB of RAM today if you're comfortable with the UI quality of an app circa 2000 (e.g. icons are 16x16 pixels at 8 bit colour depth).

[–] BadlyDrawnBoy 13 hours ago

Usually thats not the case. Its mostly abstraction layers upon abstraction layers upon abstraction layers that causes this issue

Sometime in the late 90s there started a fundamental change in the software development process. We changed from optimising software for the end user (development is difficult) to optimising the software development process for the developer at the expense of user resources

[–] mike_hearn 13 hours ago

That's true for Electron apps. For other kinds of desktop app, it's mostly stuff like artwork, double buffers and fonts. Go profile a desktop app heap and see for yourself.

One of the main selling points of Turbo Pascal was OWL: the Object Windows Library, which was just a big OOP abstraction over Win16. Here's some sample code:

https://github.com/TeamVault/pascal-programs/blob/master/Pas...

Doesn't look radically different to how a GUI app that targets a native framework would look today. OWL added bloat to make developer lives easier. It was ever thus.

[–] BadlyDrawnBoy 13 hours ago

I think its true for most types of modern development for apps with a UI, not just electron

>Doesn't look radically different to how a GUI app that targets a native framework would look today

Modern "Native" frameworks are part of the problem. I cant comment on Windows current state as I havent used Windows since I moved my gaming rig from Windows 7 to Linux many, many years ago but even then Windows frameworks were a complete mess

Take Libadwaita for example. I migrated an old, very simple disk image manipulation utility app last year from GTK2 to modern gnome. No change in capabilities, a simple clone in GTK4 / Libadwaita. It went from using ~19MB to ~185MB without any additional functionality simply by switching the "Native" framework

[–] markus_zhang 14 hours ago

We do have free pascal and it looks pretty good I think.

[–] hnlmorg 14 hours ago

There’s no substitute for human knowledge. What if the climate crisis gets to the point where we cannot justify boiling the ocean to perform tasks we’ve come to depend on?

What’s our disaster recovery strategy in the event of war and loss of internet?

Or worse yet, a near extinction event and we are forced to rebuild civilisation from memory?

Some of these might seem like extreme edge case scenarios but then history is full of disasters that people didn’t prepare for because they assumed they were too big to fail.

[–] andsoitis 14 hours ago

> There’s no substitute for human knowledge.

Would you not say that AI is an expression of the sum of all human knowledge? And as humans continue to generate more knowledge, it too, will be added to the AI's representation of it all?

[–] nostrademons 6 hours ago

So there's a common dichotomy in software engineering between the "big ball of mud" and "beautiful diamond" patterns. A big ball of mud is a software system that grows through accretion: it often has tangled flow control, data whales, lots of special-casing, lookup tables, and so on. It evolves, it isn't really designed. A beautiful diamond is a software system that is meticulously designed, consistent, oftentimes with tight interdependencies between how it works. Everything is efficient and easy to understand, but if you take one part out of it, it tends to fall apart. Common Lisp is a big ball of mud, Scheme is a beautiful diamond. C++ is a big ball of mud, K&R C is a beautiful diamond. Windows is a big ball of mud, BeOS is a beautiful diamond. Microsoft VSCode is a big ball of mud, Turbo Pascal is a beautiful diamond.

The big ball of mud structure is often taken to be an antipattern: at least, when I Googled this, Gemini told me it's a "haphazard, tangled anti-pattern" and gave me some advice about how to refactor such a software system into a beautiful diamond. But nearly all software systems that people actually use and maintain are big balls of mud. This is because the big ball of mud tolerates partial failure extremely well. It tolerates changing requirements very well. It tolerates parallel development very well. You can change part of it without throwing away the whole thing.

AI is a beautiful diamond. For the most part, if an AI model malfunctions, you have to blow it away and retrain it. Or I guess you can build layers to fix up the output case-by-case, but then you're really building a big ball of mud around the beautiful diamond, and obscuring it in the process.

That's a little worrisome when it comes to durability. Living, enduring systems usually end up becoming a patchwork of mud. Your ability to do this with LLMs are basically limited to LoRa patches and post-processing steps.

[–] sellmesoap 13 hours ago

There's much more about humans then there is writing about them, a lot of cultures with oral histories, a lot of nuance in behavior we take for granted, can it all be digitized?

[–] hnlmorg 14 hours ago

I would say your reply feels like you didn’t read beyond the first sentence of my comment.

If you did, then I apologise. But my point is about accessing that knowledge when AI isn’t available. Not about how AI discovered its corpus to begin with.

[–] andsoitis 14 hours ago

I re-read it. I think your thesis is that we ought not to depend on technology in case the infra to support it goes away. Does that capture it?

[–] hnlmorg 14 hours ago

No. It’s that we shouldn’t depend on AI always being available.

Absolutely we should use all the tools at our disposal which enhances productivity. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also learn how’re to do things for ourselves too.

To use a contrived example, there’s no shame in using a dishwasher. But if you cannot wash dishes by hand when the dishwasher breaks down, then you know you have problems.

[–] andsoitis 14 hours ago

> It’s that we shouldn’t depend on AI always being available.

I made the general tech-dependence statement, but it sounds like you think it is only AI tech that shouldnt' depend on. I wouldn't worry about it; humanity has proven itself to be INCREDIBLY resilient and adaptable when the things we've come to depend on go away or change materially.

[–] hnlmorg 14 hours ago

We aren’t just talking about technology, we are talking about knowledge.

Like I said, I have zero issue being “AI first”. 90% of my day-to-day is using AI. But the part I objected to in the OP was “we don’t need to know things because we have AI” (to paraphrase. So I was asking the question: what if AI goes away?

I agree humans are resilient. But that’a not a good excuse for complacency.

[–] CookieCrisp 13 hours ago

I feel like having a local qwen model that could run without the internet competes with having a local searchable wikipedia. If disaster does strike, we could now recreate a lot of knowledge with a single high end pc

[–] elisbce 14 hours ago

That already happened many times in history to many civilizations. Knowledge was discovered and lost, and rediscovered years later or never.

[–] hnlmorg 14 hours ago

Yes, I hinted at that. And each time that civilisation fell. With the next occupiers of the land left to find it.

Do we really want to put ourselves in the same situation?

[–] krapp 14 hours ago

We are already in that situation and it's far too late to prepare for countermeasures. The only culture we're leaving behind is our garbage.

[–] hnlmorg 14 hours ago

I disagree. However even if that were true, that’s more of a reason to learn more instead of less.

[–] tonyedgecombe 14 hours ago

>I agree, but AI also there is hope!

It's like a religion isn't it.

[–] mapontosevenths 7 hours ago

My typo didn't help, but no. It is literally nothing like a religion.

[–] layer8 8 hours ago

You just gotta have faith.

[–] andai 14 hours ago

Or we could just ask them to build something less embarrassing?

[–] bitwize 8 hours ago

Hail the Omnissiah! There is no strength in flesh, only weakness!

[–] elisbce 14 hours ago

I’m not sure where he got that idea. All I could learn about TP was like one book sold in one bookstore in my entire city. The barriers to entry back then were astronomically higher than they are today, especially given how AI has democratized access to information, knowledge, and expertise.