Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. A lot of people didn’t survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my account’s cake day, too, so that’s cool.)
This could be regarded as a neat fun hack, if it wasn’t built by appropriating the entire world of open source software while also destroying the planet with obscene energy and resource consumption.
And not only do they do all that… it’s also presented by those who wish this to be the future of all software. But for that, a “neat fun hack” just isn’t enough.
Can LLMs produce software that kinda works? Sure, that’s not new. Just like LLMs can generate books with correct grammar inside, and vaguely about a given theme. But is such a book worth reading? No. And is this compiler worth using? Also no.
(And btw, this approach only works with an existing good compiler as “oracle”. So forget about doing that to create a new compiler for a new language. In addition, there’s certainly no other language with as many compilers as C, providing plenty of material for the training set.)
This shouldn’t be left merely implied, the autoplag trained on GCC, clang, and every single poor undergrad who had to slap together a working C compiler for their compilers course and uploaded it to github, and “learnt” fuckall