In today’s episode, Yud tries to predict the future of computer science.
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holy fuck, programming and programmers both seem extremely annoying in yud’s version of the future. also, I feel like his writing has somehow gotten much worse lately. maybe I’m picking it out more because he’s bullshitting on a subject I know well, but did he always have this sheer density of racist and conservative dogwhistles in his weird rants?
Yeah, typical reactionary spiral, it’s bad. Though at least this one doesn’t have a bit about how rape is cool actually.
Yud tried to describe a compiler, but ended up with a tulpa. I wonder why that keeps happening~
Yud would be horrified to learn about INTERCAL (WP, Esolangs), which has required syntax for politely asking the compiler to accept input. The compiler is expressly permitted to refuse inputs for being impolite or excessively polite.
I will not blame anybody for giving up on reading this wall of text. I had to try maybe four or five times, fighting the cringe. Most unrealistic part is having the TA know any better than the student. Yud is completely lacking in the light-hearted brevity that makes this sort of Broccoli Man & Panda Woman rant bearable.
I can somewhat sympathize, in the sense that there are currently multiple frameworks where Python code is intermixed with magic comments which are replaced with more code by ChatGPT during a compilation step. However, this is clearly a party trick which lacks the sheer reproducibility and predictability required for programming.
Y’know, I’ll take his implicit wager. I bet that, in 2027, the typical CS student will still be taught with languages whose reference implementations use either:
- the classic 1970s-style workflow of parsing, tree transformation, and instruction selection; or
- the classic 1980s-style workflow of parsing, bytecode generation, and JIT.
@corbin You missed the best bit: one of the current INTERCAL compilers, CLC-INTERCAL (for a superset of the language which adds a bunch more insanity) is implemented IN INTERCAL! It’s self-compiling. Also object-oriented, has quantum-indeterminate operators, and a computed COME FROM statement (also with quantum indeterminacy).
I think we should organize a fundraiser to pay CLC-INTERCAL’s developer @Uilebheist to visit Yud and melt his brain.
@MeiLin @cstross @corbin @Uilebheist What’s so hard to understand? https://esolangs.org/wiki/Quantum_INTERCAL 🤣
@corbin it’s a fucking _compiler_. What working or teaching programmer would accept “AI wrangling” in exchange for marginal improvements in the efficiency of the code that’s output? Just chuck some more compute at it…
tmy;dr
(too much Yud; didn’t read)
Eliezer Yudkowsky was late so he had to type really fast. A compiler was hiden near by so when Eliezer Yudkowsky went by the linter came and wanted to give him warnings and errors. Here Eliezer Yudkowsky saw the first AI because the compiler was posessed and operating in latent space.
“I cant give you my client secret compiler” Eliezer Yudkowsky said
“Why not?” said the compiler back to Eliezer Yudkowsky.
“Because you are Loab” so Eliezer Yudkowsky kept typing until the compiler kill -9’d itself and drove off thinking “my latent space waifu is in trouble there” and went faster.
Reading this story I just don’t understand why the main character doesn’t just take a screwdriver to his annoyingly chatty office-chair and download a normal non-broken compiler.
There’s technobabble as a legitimate literary device, and then there’s having randomly picked up that comments and compilers are a thing in computer programming and proceeding to write an entire
parableanti-wokism screedinterminable goddamn manifesto around them without ever bothering to check what they actually are or do beyond your immediate big brain assumptions.
