Two dudes chatting about exercising a craft

Me

Indeed it does. It took me back to the days when I wrote a simple scripting engine for the “test engine” framework I built for the first company I worked at. The part where we simply declare a look-up table for variables … SO EASY … takes me back. The elegance of JavaScript here DESTROYS the C++ version I wrote, of course.

Thanks for the link. Very, very cool.

They

Yeah the power per effort of writing a scripting engine is crazy

Me

I was lucky that there were none available at the time. And we needed something to glue together the content. I basically built a web browser, I think.

It did layout, had forms, supported video, images, sounds, all sorts of text-formatting, including simple tables, and had a scripting engine.

And it ran on both Windows 95 and up, and MacOS 8.x and up. Cross-platform, in C++.

Had a custom, hyper-optimized binary format to fit a dozen accounting books on one CD. Wrote an RTF parser to import data from Word documents produced by dozens of authors. Had an intermediate format called EML. Of course there was a simple database with querying … because those didn’t exist either.

Dude, the low-level color and graphics library was a work of art. I supported auto-contrasting colors decades before CSS did. Why? How? I can’t remember anymore.

We had nothing and we liked it.

Not a single automated test. Not a one.

Memory lane right there.

They

Things that made my heart skip:

• cross platform cpp: oh you kind-hearted soul that you don’t think the only way to have something cross platform is to build it in python running on jvm
• we had nothing and we liked it. Really what I’m about to say is “fuck ai”. But the feeling came from long before them. In college they had us use c++99. If you needed a queue you built it. You needed a tree, better learn how to balance them. Then python and such came into my milieu. It was nice–it all being done for you. But sometime you gotta go and chop wood with your axe yk
• it had “xxx and yyy and zzz”. I was talking to some people about my “systems programming” class where we did such eponymous projects as writing a make clone and a tar clone. And it hammered home the fact that “it is just software”. You write a scripting engine, or a make clone, or a database. And not you “one” you you! Anyone who has an editor and a compiler can write what their heart desires.

Me

This is the way. It’s all just software. We use the existing open-source tools because they are good and we respect the amount of work that it would be to write it ourselves, but not because it is dark magic, completely inscrutable, as ineffable as magic.

They

That’s the problem with ai man.

All these so called wizards casting spells not just that they didn’t write but couldn’t.

Like sorcerers but with none of the inborn skill yet all the pride of endowment.

A lot like a gunman in the age of swords

Me

Yo. I’ve been thinking a bunch about how to wrap my head around, “it’s not the AI, it’s the vibe code” as a complement to “it’s not the gun, it’s the shooter”. Ya know? It’s not well-formulated and I have to stop typing soon because Kath is emanating irritation that I said I’d make a salad and yet, here I am, still sitting at the keyboard (as usual, she would say), but I can’t help it, so a possible reason why the U.S. has so much more gun violence than other countries with the same level of gun-ownership is that the U.S. has deliberately made its society a hotbed of mental illness, desperation, and despair, so of course more people are going to up and shoot people. So. What if there are similar pressures pushing people toward vibe-coding trash? They’ve been told most of their adult lives that “coding is where it’s at” “learn to code” “you’re nothing if you’re not part of the knowledge economy”, all while we shut down any and all other paths toward a stable, reasonable lifestyle. We also train them all to think only in the short term and in terms of gambling or lotteries. We’ve invested immense amounts of propaganda separating work from value. The most successful, powerful, and wealthy people in society are obviously wildly unqualified, not obviously intelligent, and sociopathically egotistical. So here comes a tool that promises to catapult them into the wealthy stratosphere, all while sticking it to those FUCKING NERDS who THINK THEY’RE SO MUCH SMARTER THAN US. That last part might have been influenced by this article that I read last night.

Swapping money for expertise by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

After having read the linked article, they answered

They

I like that this isn’t ai pessimism or optimism (read doomerism or hype if your brain is too internety)

It’s is very anti billionaire, which I mean, what a scalding hot take that one is.

[…]

So hearing that the money guild wants to put it all on black (the layers of that metaphor are not lost on me) in order to snuff out their only natural predator is–well–reasonable

By the same sword, my reticence to be snuffed is just as reasonable.

Me

of course we’ll win. Because physics runs the show whether you understand it or not. And understanding things is necessary to keep running things, whether you believe it or not.

You can fake it ’til you make it for things that don’t matter but Elizabeth Holmes is proof that it eventually collapses for things that do.

Now. We might not survive the collapse because the billionaires and elites are capable of flipping the table so hard that we all go down. But let’s stay positive.