https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/08/30/044226/what-happened-when-unix-co-creator-brian-kernighan-tried-rust It is a peculiar experience to know more and have a better understating that the CS celebrity, whose book you have read as a teenager. Just like I wrote before, C was a PHP of the 80s, if you will – a bunch of clever hacks (while PHP has nothing clever and was a Fractal Of Bad Design by an unqualified and ignorant amateurs) which allowed one to quickly “get shit done” in the way that wasn’t possible before, which is the reason behind its popularity. It also appeared to be way more “cool”, “practical” and clever than “theoretical” Algol or PL/1. ...

Look, ma, another top HN post in the “heavily policed safe space for mediocrity” – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45074248. They are babbling about some “philosophy of programming”, at least about how they think it should be. Well, even before the Atlas Shrugged there were “two kinds of philosophers” – ones which could see (and explain) things as they [really] are, and those who mastered the art of sophistry and abstract bullshitting, and can explain things as they want them to be. The laterr, by the way, call this ability a “creativity” (the word-marker of midwit), and the whole shitshow – a “philosophy”. ...

So-called Humanties (as the way of producing a sectarian socially constructed pretentious abstract verbiage) are done for. At least none of them deserve that high upper-middle-class social status anymore. Yes, you have to be actually smart to ask the “right questions” (be a prompt engineers LMAO!), but still. Watch how it spews out an outstanding “paper” in 30 seconds. I really don’t know what I have studied (wasted my life) for. Yes, yes, these are not final answers, and it missed subtleties, and more accurate, insightful formulations, but who needs them anymore? ...

The purpose of examination in a college or university setting is to empirically verify that a student has his own genuine understanding and could actually apply it. It is that simple. This is why some courses even allow to bring a textbook to an exam, because if one does not [already] understand the principles and techniques, the textbook is of no use. However, bringing pocket calculators, smartphones is considered a cheating, precisely because by using these devises one could appear as possessing one’s own understanding. ...

I have to rush to finish my series before AI will completely enshittificate the written knowledge and the classic discipline of programming, which is based on understanding and mathematical rigour. Yes, I seemingly overuse this word beyond the limits of a good style, but I like it, how it is awkward and ugly and yet perfectly captures what a generative AI is doing to a writtern knowledge itself. So, let’s try to build it all top-down, for a change. Bottom up is probably the better way, but it takes so long time before one begins to see the whole picture, which is, of course, the one and the same mountain (or an elephant) viewed from different angles and perspectives. ...

OpenAI has recently benedicted us with a 20 billion parameter “open source” model, which is a significant step up from the previous 7 billion parameter model. This model is designed to be more efficient and effective in understanding and generating human-like text, or rather to appear to do so. It is a total crap, by the way, at least compared to the online free-tier GROK (which is also very basic and limited). It is, obviously, “competing” with the DeepSeek’s “open source” offerings, and have a very similar “feel”. ...

I have noticed a resent dramatic change in the behavior of major GPTs online providers – most notably, Gemini is now providing just outline of code, full of stubs and “mocks” of real APIs, and not the full code. This is a significant change from the previous behavior where they would provide a semi-complete (but ridden with errors) code solution. Perhaps, mimicking the behavior of ChatGPT, which has been doing this for a while now – they “optimize” for more what appears to be a “dialogue” (more like a normie-level chat), to create a better illusion of “actually conversing with an artificial intelligence”. ...

We are living through a paradigmatic shift, the one described in the “Scientific Revolution” by Thomas Kuhn. As I mentioned many times, texts and even crappy code became very, very cheap, just like a processed junk-food or a low-effort street-food slop. This is the “shift” and the end of so-called “knowledge work” as we know it. At least this is the end of the pretentious “knowledge work”, when one just pretends to be an expert is social settings, using very straightforward verbal and non-verbal cues to signal their “knowledge” and “expertise”, just as a priest would do in the not so distant past. ...

Today’s bullshit was Surge CEO Says ‘100x Engineers’ Are Here. Yesterday it was “Gemini at IMO Gold level”. Again, mere appearances are not the facts of reality, but this realization requires a bit more education and old-fashioned intelligence, similar to that of Hesse or Sartre. What does it mean nowadays to be an engineer, and to be a 100x? It seems that the meaning is what they call “productivity”, which is time elapsed for putting together some spaghetti webshit .without any understanding whatsoever, from hundreds of lowest quality amateur node_modules in a few minutes. This is what 100x means for them, and this is, of course, bullshit. ...

Oh, look gold medal-level performance on the world’s most prestigious math competition—the International Math Olympiad (IMO) Lets be very careful with this very clever deceptive and suggestive wording. The model “solved” (came up with acceptable solutions) some of the problems and failed on some others. The claim is that this is a gold medal-level performance, as a response to Musk’s claim of a PhD-Level in all fields. The facts, however, are following: ...