or, if you're a stoned bird, perhaps bootstrap your modern skillz by ...
a session prompting Claude to quickly write all of:
a forth style assembler for wasm
targeting a forth written in 6502 machine code (not assembly)
targeting a 6502 emulator/debugger written in Rust
that Rust being compiled into a wasm browser project with
a typescript ui for display api support for all the nested contexts
personally I've only ever done the forth-like in 6502 machine code task, but then I am old and useless (er, "retired") and wouldn't want to mislead youngsters onto my failed path
> This should be "This should be 'You're thinking'." don't you think?
Reflexively, I think it should be more like ...
javascript: `This should be "You're thinking".` ;
// to preserve the original character use and to avoid '...'...' parse foos
// however `"...".` also possibly deserves a [sic] to critique the original
// i.e. ~grammar police say the period belongs within the quote marks, no?
The word Apocalypse is on the table and if you agree that ignorance of History invites Doom then my brief perspective here may appeal to you (otherwise tl;dnr) ...
From the AI Apocalypse Is Here essay:
... the truth that widespread interaction with machines endowed with
conversational language abilities and superhuman cognitive power is
the greatest social-psychological experiment the species has ever run.
No. Our ongoing History would like a word. There is another.
As a boy I had conversations with my grandfather who was born in 1888. If my parents were still alive they would be 104 years old. My older sister (deceased) did Duck & Cover drills in school (but I did not, as I am only 64).
I have lived my whole life with always a small number of men able to (roughly) push a button and end our whole world. Like most of you, I don't think about that much.
But the other day I parked outside a small town USA Post Office and noticed the faded yellow & black triangles icon on a sign reading: Bomb Shelter.
The MAD reason this doom has not happened, despite apparently a number of close calls, is not that our past and present leaders are always wise good people, but that everyone in the high tech multi-trillion dollar nuclear weapons universe has, so far, plausibly believed that if they nuke, everyone else will nuke, inevitably being a Mutually Assured Destruction.
The societies and voters and economies of the world's post WWII "great powers" had to be convinced and corralled (for way more than my whole 64 year lifetime) that this MAD experiment was going to work.
And nuclear weapons pose a verifiable Apocalypse, not a maybe~AGI + maybe~Apocalypse.
Have we been lucky? Or is MAD, genius? Both?
I do see we are not in the mood/mode to be very MAD at exploding AI.
also from ^ article on Lockheed Martin Corp space shuttle software group ...
Importantly, the group avoids blaming people for errors.
The process assumes blame - and it's the process that is
analyzed to discover why and how an error got through.
At the same time, accountability is a team concept:
no one person is ever solely responsible for writing or
inspecting code. "You don't get punished for making errors,"
says Marjorie Seiter, a senior member of the technical staff.
"If I make a mistake, and others reviewed my work, then I'm
not alone. I'm not being blamed for this."
> The exercise didn't necessarily feel easy to deduce within the 20 minutes I tried,
I admire your breakdown, and I felt your pain.
My frustration was with opening a new tab for each sample because I was too lazy to transcribe rolls (for review) -- so once I'd opened and revisited about 16 tabs I got rather annoyed and just started rapid rolling looking for high values ...
After about 30 seconds of this pique I rolled a Yahtzee 55555 value 20 and went: Doh!
My takeaway is that using "induction" to illuminate Human ~vs LLM may be wrong framing when Eureka moments are possible.
Matrix Reloaded (2003) ...
Neo: Hiya fellas.
Agent 1: It’s him.
Agent 2: The Anomaly.
Agent 3: Do we proceed?
Agent 2: Yes.
Agent 3: He is still...
Agent 1: ...only human.
Neo: Hmm--*upgrades* [beats all three nonetheless]
Apropos, from Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One (2018) ...
The shareholders won't be happy.
Sorrento:
It's not our job to make them happy.
It's our job to make them money,
but once we launch this little baby, they're gonna flip!
We call this Pure O2.
This is the first of our planned upgrades.
Once we can roll back some of Halliday's ad restrictions,
we estimate we can sell up to
80% of an individual's visual field
before inducing seizures.
> It is based on the premise of making work easier for workers. The objective is to thoroughly eliminate waste and shorten lead times to deliver vehicles to customers quickly, at a low cost, and with high quality.
^ = from your linked Toyota Production System philosophy
Thanks for that link! I find those two early sentences to be an insightful and relatively complete loop of process.
When considering using automation or ~A.I. we can easily ask: which part of this loop is our addition improving (or messing up)? Where is the balance that works?
As you point out, answering these what-works/quality questions are not solved problems and expertise is needful, but careful consideration does not seem to be a popular mode in our age of fountaining funny money and magic genies.
I grew up in the '60s where the science fiction/future was always: march of progress and you'll have so much time and choices! Now I am in the future and the reality is close to: who has the time?
More insidiously/invisibly: you have plenty of time for endless momentary thrills, but no one has time to make things better.
Once upon a time there were customer complaint departments and the Production System would get fixed. Then it became suggestion boxes and returns. Then pleading for a Return Merchandise Authorization. Then it's your call is valuable to us recordings before click call hangups. Oops, unhappy customer?--give 'em a coupon to keep up the addiction, it's cheaper than Quality Control.
The latest devolution seems like fire the workers but use AI to mesmerize customers, or just mind control ~investors and ~regulators, since who needs cover-our-costs-paying-customers anyway?
The hover-text for the OP's linked xkcd cartoon is :
I find that when someone's taking time to do something right in the present,
they're a perfectionist with no ability to prioritize,
whereas when someone took time to do something right in the past,
they're a master artisan of great foresight.
or, loosely reinterpreted: Don't make me wait for my donuts!
In OP's terminology, I would add that the left-path ascenders are playing king-of-the-hill as they know that (in our current business environment) they can be the one to roll down rocks from the top to both crush those latecomers attempting to overtake them, as well as cheaply flatten paths up for the consumer masses.
Those masses will pay this King for an easy ascent because, above all, the Hormuz spice must flow.
Who has time to make their own donuts?!
From this kind of P.O.V. the OP's middle and right paths are often just losing strategies whose appeal lies in their comfort & morality (i.e. a luxury of personal preference).
To be clear, I am not personally advocating for Capitalist Utilitarianism here, but I find it worthwhile to see our current turmoil from this higher viewpoint and perhaps relevant to some personal software development decisions.
a session prompting Claude to quickly write all of:
personally I've only ever done the forth-like in 6502 machine code task, but then I am old and useless (er, "retired") and wouldn't want to mislead youngsters onto my failed path