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cobol is old and scary, so a chat bot spitting out cobol that someone without grey hair cant fully comprehend is enough for them to deem it fully automated and defeat of the dinosaur. reality you are right, it wont move the needle.

The fact it doesn’t have an assembler or linker, and I am doubting it implemented its own lexical analyzer, I almost struggle to call this a compiler.

The claim it is from scratch is misleading since it has all prior training from open source.

Building a small compiler for a simple language (C is pretty simple, especially older versions) is a common learning exercise and not difficult. This is very much another situation where “AI” created an over simplified version of something with hidden details on how it got there as a way to further push the propaganda that it is so capable.

Dave Mosher is a Principal Consultant at Test Double, and has experience in legacy modernization, agentic coding, and explaining CORS poorly to people who didn’t ask.

What legitimate experience does he possess? I can only assume legacy modernization means throw spaghetti microservice buzzword architecture at the client. And he admits he doesn’t really know CORS. I see these blogs about how LLMs are so much better than humans for programming yet never written by someone who has put together anything more complex and bigger scale than their myspace page in '05.

did they use ai to make the image? “wood of of year”

Of course Disney loves its cease and desists such as one to character.ai in October and one today to Google: https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/disney-google-ai-copyright-infringement-cease-and-desist-letter-1236606429/

Is this actually because of brand protection or just shareholder value? Racist, sexist, and all around abhorrent content is now easily generated with your favorite Disney owned characters just as long as you do it on the approved platform.

Disney invests $1B into OpenAI with allowing access to all Disney characters

https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/disney-openai-sora-agreement/

The comments are filled with people thinking they are smart by questioning what is human intelligence and how can we trust ourselves. The kool-aid is quite strong. I am no Stallman lover and have bumped into him more than once locally but I do think the fella who started much of common computing tools and was part of MIT AI lab for a bit may know a thing or two. Or maybe I have been eating my toe too much.

Is there any search engine that isn’t pushing an “AI mode” of sorts? Some are more sneaky or give option to “opt out” like duckduckgo, but this all feels temporary until it is the only option.

I have found it strange how many people will say “I asked chatgpt” with the same normalcy as “googling” was.

Gentoo is firmly against AI contributions as well. NetBSD calls AI code “tainted”, while FreeBSD hasn’t been as direct yet but isn’t accepting anything major.

QEMU, while not an OS, has rejected AI slop too. Curl also famously is against AI gen. So we have some hope in the systems world with these few major pieces of software.

The ffmpeg social media maintainer is an Elon fan so when he purchased Twitter and made foolish remarks about rewriting it all in C and how only hardcore programmers are cool that write C/assembly they quickly jumped on it.

https://xcancel.com/FFmpeg/status/1598655873097912320

Ya maybe it’s a way to attract more contributors or donation money. Felt a bit weird after Elon was shitting on all the people who built Twitter and firing them.

I’ve been wanting to go back to some sort of DAP full time but I’m not a huge fan of Android being the experience. Anyone got recommendations of a non-Android based DAP so I can cut the streaming services out for good?

I miss my Creative Zen back in 2008.

I’m convinced the proliferation of AI art comes from a generation of digital inhalants.

Is “triangle man” a slur I’m unaware of or a goofy name to be calling someone for whatever reason?

I love how it’s a public ledger of transactions so once a wallet can be identified to an owner, everyone can see what you’ve done. Not very great system to keep anonymous.

Ultra trivialization is the blood of tech bros. Everything is so easy and everyone else is just so clueless. Boy met computer through hello world and thought that’s the pinnacle of computer science.

How long til some bright eyed influencer dev tries to take on JPL and MISRA? It’s always some middleware garbage these startups make and never a QNX competitor.

I bump into a lot of peers/colleagues who are always “ya but what is intelligence” or simply cannot say no to AI. For a while I’ve tried to use the example that if these “AI coding” things are tools, why would I use a tool that’s never perfect? For example I wouldn’t reach for a 10mm wrench that wasn’t 10mm and always rounds off my bolt heads. Of course they have “it could still be useful” responses.

I’m now realizing most programmers haven’t done a manual labor task that’s important. Or lab science outside of maybe high school biology. And the complete lack of ability to put oneself in the shoes of another makes my rebuttals fall flat. To them everything is a nail and anything could be a hammer if it gets them paid to say so. Moving fast and breaking things works everywhere always.

For something not just venting I tasked a coworker with some runtime memory relocation and Gemini had this to say about ASLR: Age, Sex, Location Randomization

My vibes based thoughts on Quantum bubble: it’s been tried before and never stuck. It’s too science-y for the common folk to buy-in. AI sold fear, crypto sold “ownership” and “banking freedom” and of course “FOMO to invest early like imagine buying Apple when it was a $1!”, and dotcom sold anything computer.

But now everyone has computer, crypto questions never answered so it remains in a small capacity still on the “ya but what if”, and AI isn’t able to actually replace anyone after trillions of dollars poured in so it’s going the way of crypto (will still be around but not in our faces at every turn).

Quantum just never had and never will have those pulls. Like I remember the attempt to sell fear a decade or more ago when everyone was like “passwords and encryption become meaningless!” But it was still all hypothetical. Being hardware is a huge part of the fizzle. Software you can make pretty interface and spin up a PoC that doesn’t do anything but you can have someone use the prototype to get the “omggghg it’s real” feeling. Without hardware being accessible it just looks like nerds in lab coats and no one cares.

A friend at a former workplace was in a discussion with that company leadership earlier this week to understand how and what metrics are to be used for promotion candidates since the office is directed to use “AI” tools for coding. Simply put: lots of entry and lower level engineers submit PRs that are co-authored by Claude so it is difficult to measure their actual software development skills to determine if they should get promoted.

That leadership had no real answers just lots of abstract garbage (vibes essentially) and followed up with telling all the entry levels to reduce the code they write and use the purchased agentic tool.

Along with this a buddy at a very famous prop shop says the firm decided to freeze all junior hiring and is leaning into only hiring senior+ and replacing juniors with AI. He asked what will happen when the current seniors leave/retire and got hit with shock that would even be considered.

Ian Lance Taylor (of GOLD, Go, and other tech fame) had a take on chatbots being AGI that I liked to see from an influential person of computing. https://www.airs.com/blog/archives/673

The summary is that chatbots are not AGI, using the current AI wave as the usher to AGI is not it, and all around dislikes in a very polite way that chatbot LLMs are seen as AI.

Apologies if this was posted when published.

I remember popping into IRC or a mailing list to ask subsystem questions to learn from the sources themselves how something works (or should work). Depending who what and where definitely had differing experiences but overall I felt like there was typically a helpful person on the other side. Nowadays I fear the slop will make people a lot less willing to help when they are overwhelmed with AI generated garbage patches or mails losing some of the rose-tinted charm of open source.