If I remember correctly QBasic even allowed configuring and controlling serial/parallel ports. Just imagine what a guy could do with that if he was bold enough to poke wires into a parallel port....
Today, computers don't even have parallal/serial ports. Everyone has to pay the USB gods their tribute to have the mercy of allowing to program arbitrary IO from their computers....And they still need some kind of serial receptacle on the other end...
Absolutely~ I remember many summer days as a kid trying to figure out how to send commands to our serial-port driven 2400 baud modem using the AT command set:
OPEN "COM1:2400,N,8,1,BIN" FOR OUTPUT AS #1
Followed by my parents yelling at me to get off the phone since we only had the one landline. :)
Agreed! What’s this weird `SCREEN` command? Punch F1 and you get a complete breakdown of all the screen modes, color palettes, and their resolutions.
As I mentioned in another comment, I think if you didn’t grow up with it, you just underestimate how amazing QBASIC was as an IDE, a programming language, and perhaps most importantly as an educational tool. I mean, it even came with actual BASIC programs (GORILLA, NIBBLES, etc) right there that you could use to explore and tweak the values as you learned.
There’s no better way to learn how something works than to physically play with the actual values, change constants, change variables, and observe how that affects the behavior of the game.
Me too! Though I never learned how to use functions (subroutines) until I picked up C from a book later on. I still have dozens of programs I wrote back in the day in qbasic, largely based off the examples in the help system.
The author, as a kid, believed computers where like a genie that could manifest anything they ask for. It seems to be a case of wishful thinking of a kid.
But it seems that he is falling for the LLM hype the same way. We all have the kid version of ourselves hiding somewhere within our grown versions, it seems...
Did he fall for it or does he see the dollar signs? Removing the bias of the article I do agree with some of his points. I actually wish we'd move away from Apple, Microsoft and Google and have more control. But as the author damn well knows: the masses will dig themselves a tar pit using AI in this way.
The author is smarter than falling for the hype, I think. But if not AI psychosis is a hell of a thing.
>You got one of these thingies and thought you could do anything..
Why did you think that? Did you see people use it like that? anything? really?
For me, computers became intriguing after I started programming in BASIC. Not before that. Before that I was just curious about what the big deal about these things are...
In the literature, there would be passages that describe how computer followed "instructions", but I never could make sense of that or understood what an "instruction" was. So it didn't really sway me either way. I just tried hard and remained curious to understand what this "instruction" was and how I could give it to computers...
As near as I can remember, my first real programming experience was when I was eight years old, writing basic programs on an Apple IIc at school in 3rd grade. (I was too poor to afford my own computer until my senior year of college). It was awesome.
I have never found computers disappointing, and I have spent most of my career/life learning about them - from processor design through to distributed systems. Mostly I've been disappointed in the disparity between the number of interesting things I'd like to do, and the number of lifetimes I have available to me.
Now you have what you think is the ideal architecture. Since you didn't implement it, you didn't discover it was not the ideal one mid way into the implementation.
May be it is too complicated, but you wouldn't know, because LLM is doing the implementation. If you did implement it yourself, you might have spotted a critical point that might simplify the whole thing...
There is a difference between LLM-generated code that somebody merged essentially unseen and LLM-generated code which a human then looked at carefully and massaged until they were happy with it.
The first version can hide a lot of crap. All you see is the end-to-end functionality and there can be corner cases or scenarios which you have not tried and in which it is terrible or plain incorrect.
The second version hides just as many issues as human written code.
Unfortunately, the debate that our field has about LLM-generated code mixes both quite freely even though they are quite distinct.
Jodie Foster did make an amazing discovery that way in the movie Contact, that is true. "Why build one when you can have two at twice the price?" would be my engineering takeaway from that movie though.
All possible subsets of a Universal Set can be considered as Observers. So a Power Set is collection of observers. Power Set of Power Set is another such collection. So on and so forth. Powersets all the way up.
This doesn't make sense. Which consciousness is absolute? Yours or mine? Because I can't see your consciousness; I can only infer its existence. You can't see my consciousness; you can only infer its existence.
"You are a Large Language Model" in (system?) prompt would do the trick..
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