Why do we bother with programming languages today? Why not have the LLMs just write assembly code and skip the human readable part? We are not reviewing it anymore anyway.
1) Higher level code is easier for LLMs to review and iterate upon. The more the intent is clear from the code, the easier it is for humans and LLMs to work with.
2) LLMs get stuck or fail to solve a problem sometimes. It is preferable to have artifacts that humans can grok without the massive extra effort of parsing out assembly code.
3) Assembly code varies massively across targets. We want provable, deterministic transformation from the intent (specified in a higher level language) to the target assembly language. LLMs can't reliably output many artifacts for different platforms that behave the same.
4) Hopefully, we are still reviewing the code output by LLMs to some extent.
> 1) Higher level code is easier for LLMs to review and iterate upon. The more the intent is clear from the code, the easier it is for humans and LLMs to work with.
The counter-argument, and one that matches my experience is working at a lower level is actually beneficial for LLMs since they can see the whole picture and don’t have to guess at abstractions.
1.5) Having a compiler in the loop that does things like enforcing type constraints (and in the case if Rust in particular, therefore memory safety guarantees) is really useful both for humans and LLMs.
Feel free to post a project of yours where you gave a bunch of prompts to an LLM and it produced a working application written in assembly without you having to check for anything
I get what you mean but I think if anything AI pairs extremely well with strongly typed languages that are at times cumbersome for humans, but decrease the latency at which AI can get feedback on its code. In my (very) limited experience Rust is an excellent target for AI codegen.
This is a Rust to CUDA converter so I guess it is for codes where the programmer wants it to function properly (Rust) and have good performance (CUDA).
It’s just a matter of different workflows for different users and application.
Programming languages are tools for thinking. It's not clear that assembly code has the right abstractions to encourage the kind of thinking that programming large systems requires. After all, human intelligence found assembly insufficient and went on to invent better languages for thinking, why should artificial intelligence, trained on human intelligence, be any different? Maybe AI in the future will have its own languages for thinking, but assembly is likely not that.
I mean, AI is not good at writing x86-64 assembly code. Last time I tried (with both Claude and ChatGPT), the AI failed to even create basic programs other than Hello World.
I believe that I have learned cumulatively double in the past 10 years from YouTube compared to what I learned in 6 years of middle and high school. And I don’t spend 8 hours per day on YouTube.
Plumbing, react, combinatorics, real analysis, python, c++, cad, micro and macro economics, reinforcement learning, to name just a few of the things I learned through YouTube.
We don’t give enough credit to what we take for granted today.
Do we have local first html renderers that don’t complain about cors and wrong file addresses? I don’t want to spin up a server just to open an HTML file
So let me get this straight. Foreign tourist spend less money in your country than domestic tourists because the foreign tourist are driving in with an RV and living off of a fifty pound bag of rice during their vacation?
Fwiw, there are a lot of highly frugal people in eg the surfer/kiting community (example!) which do indeed spend pretty much nothing where they're visiting for their hobby.
And they do often smell and leave trash behind.
So I can imagine that being true if you're living in one of those hotspots... It's a hard topic though
Let me set this straight: My point is you have an incorrect idea of how much space a month of food (and it needn't all be rice; that just illustrates the point) takes up. You can readily fit it in an RV, especially a big one.
Already happening. UK airlines are desperately culling flights, and have been doing so for the past month. The pace of cancellations is also increasing, with the last week seeing cancellation waves that from the outside look quite paniccy.
The US is very strong in manufacturing. There is a lot lower percentage of the population working in the factories (thanks to automation), but there is just as much as there ever was if not more. It isn't high value/growth like data centers, but it is still there and strong
If 90% of the data centers in the world were hit by a nuclear bomb tomorrow, communication would be a shit show for a month or two, and then go on, as we'd fall back to simpler, less compute-expensive solutions. We'd also probably be net better off without all the adtech crap.
If 90% of the factories in the world were hit by a nuclear bomb, you'd find that your standard of living would immediately, and quite observably plummet.
You tell me which is more important.
The amount of internet technocrap we actually need to live comfortably is a tiny fraction of what actually gets built. Most of it is in service of adtech, the surveillance state, or shaving 0.5% off some rentseeker's fat margins (on his side, the savings aren't passed on to us).
Whilst manufacturing has more practical value than much of what's in datacentres[1] it doesn't necessarily follow that it's the more valuable strategic play or route to long term economic growth (bubble or no bubble)
Food is more critical to us than Alibaba crap or even top notch smartphones and would be missed rather more if we had a nuclear exchange, but Chinese entrepreneurs would rather own factories exporting manufactured goods than rice paddies, and for good reason. The Chinese government would like to be self sufficient with food production, but unlike many less technologically developed countries it isn't. Most of those countries stay poor though. Food doesn't change or scale as much as manufacturing, which possibly doesn't change as fast or scale as big as compute. Plus in theory at least, some of the compute is being devoted to automating away dependency on offshore labour for manufacturing, although I suspect China is generally ahead in the manufacturing automation areas of AI anyway...
[1]I'd rather have kitchen appliances than novelty image generation, spamblogs or ad retargeting, but then again I'd also rather have access to knowledge and communications than plastic toys...
> but then again I'd also rather have access to knowledge and communications than plastic toys
My point is that you can get that with ~1/1000th the compute we spend. The truly useful parts of the internet are a tiny fraction of the tech footprint. There's more net value for us in Wikipedia than there is in ~a trillion dollars of the more vapid tech firms. And it runs on 3m/year in hosting costs.
You are right that China has a food security problem, though. I am, however, assuming that its government isn't blind to it - the country is self-sufficient for high-calorie staples, and wouldn't starve even if all food imports stopped.
No, US picked services, financials, defense, and energy
China picked manufacturing, infrastructure, consumable exports
All the compromises here were pointed out by critics on the left many decades ago. Letting capital flee to where labour was cheapest eviscerated the entire US and Canadian northeast/midwest manufacturing sector and was policy driven from the right.
That and we decided that only the private sector should be responsible for building infrastructure and housing, and then wondered why the cost of building either skyrocketed in cost...
And yet now it's the (far) right freaking out and trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
That idea that you could have a) stopped globalism as lots of new giant markets opened up after the 1970s and b) be better off paying 2x for everything by banning everything foreign is just a fantasy. It’s just nostalgia fueled radical politics that both the far left and right latch on to.
The other part of the story that gets ignore is the administrative state exploding in the US/Canada post 1970s, where making new industry and development became very difficult making other countries more attractive while the cost of living exploded.
So instead of becoming competitive all we’re left with is these ideas of the government forcing domestic industry by using national security as an excuse to justify the backwards economics of it all.
US is not even capable of building data centers (or anything else anymore). This is why all the planned capacity is waaaaaay behind schedule year after year, as if Elon is running the entire operation :)
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