The gas town guy has like 12 $200 Claude subscriptions to run like 20 bots to automate churn in a 20 year old game with literally 5 players in it. 10 if you count all the level 1 players who just came to grief it.
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With 16-bit instructions, a 32 KiB ROM (not huge for that era) is space for 16,384 instructions. Most programmers could write a couple of hundred instructions per day, at least, so that's only 2.5 person months to completely fill the ROM with code, assuming that you're writing assembly. Once you get to 1 MiB of code memory, you're talking a lot more, but that was the tail end of that era.
But most of the time people weren't writing from a completely empty PROM, they'd have a bunch of service routines for things like maths, line drawing, and so on. Often even a BASIC interpreter, so they weren't writing assembly. Even as a child, I could run out of code memory before I ran out of things I wanted to do quite easily.
The early PCs were also like this. My first Windows machine had 640 KiB of RAM. Windows used most of it. Almost all of the programs I used were C or C++, a few Pascal, and a huge number of them were from a single author.
@david_chisnall @jonny As well as the operating system (scheduler, I/O, filing system, memory management, ect ect) we had to write our own stuff for things like line drawing (IIRC it was the ellipse drawing that was hard work as there are so many special cases, to do with how many eighth-ellipse segments fit entirely within a single pixel).
Once the OS was there, writing applications was much more straightforward, and usually a single person job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68K/OS (that's my handwriting on at least one of the labels)
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waiting for the time when each model gets its own family, hang out and chat with the other models, and gets its own therapist and we all get to ask the question like when we load up someone's The Sims save which parts of it are the projection and wish fulfillment parts.
@jonny TFW you realise that Large Language Model Therapist is essentially already a job, except we call it "vibe coding"
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A lot of people, including me, were attracted to programming in the ‘80s and early ‘90s because it was a field where you could work on your own and achieve something worthwhile. A lot of the games I played growing up are individual or very small team projects. A load of the useful programs were built by individuals.
Adding more people to a team didn’t really help. When you’re targeting machines with well under 1 MiB of RAM, there’s a limit to the maximum possible complexity, which is less than one person can build.
As the complexity ceiling increased, programming became more like engineering: a team sport. Specialism because useful and so, therefore, did collaborating with people with different specialisms. As a load of things proved to be common to large classes of program, collaboration and shared common implementations became much more important.
I think there are a lot of people, especially my age and above, who strongly disliked that transition. The ability to go back to one person sitting in a dark room by themselves creating a masterpiece is their ideal. And LLM vendors are aggressively targeting that misanthropic nostalgia because many of these people are now decision makers.
Those of us who grew up with Babylon 5 know that humans build communities.
@david_chisnall @jonny Vibe coders: "I am a rugged self-reliant individualist, which is why my entire career and self-worth depends on sending all of my money to a trillion-dollar company with the power consumption of Belgium"
(The early age of home computing was a magical time, but if I wanted to recapture that the very last thing I'd want to do is sign myself over to the companies that are a major part of why it now isn't)
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people say numbers like "69 billion tokens" as if that's not much, since computers do billions of things all the time right. but like... whenever i actually try and relate the numbers to anything real they always make my jaw drop
https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117041054498249913
92,000 copies of war and peace laid end to end and what does it get you? if you take a look at the discord it looks like "5 people who have been friends and hanging out around this ancient squirrelly MMO for years initially excited for updates but increasingly pissed that their game is broken"
worse than nothing for nobody, negative for nobody at the cost of $86,000 a month
@jonny What's so funny is that this guy is all. "Only a model the size of a planet can understand this game", and then you see that the game looks like trash. It reminds me of Argentum Online, a free argentinian MMO from 1999 that I used to play on a dialup connection back in the day done with paint.
BTW: Argentum Online has about 75 players per day on steam, so it's doing 10 times better than Wyvern.
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THE WHOLE POINT of programming to me is to make things to GIVE THEM AWAY to other people so that they don't have to do them themselves and EVERYONE HAS FREE ACCESS to ANYTHING THEY NEED. the idea that rather than being able to participate in a large and collaborative social space where i can build on my colleagues work I instead rent a private vertical slice of their stolen, soylentized flash frozen expertise to create a completely isolated island of a thing without the expectation that anyone else might take and use it is HELL to me. absolute hell. other people are in fact a feature and not a bug.
@jonny That's why I don't like the rust rewrites of GNU code and the use of BSD and MIT licenses replacing the GPL.
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i am sort of stuck on this. you have to remember whenever these totally off the planet AI guys describe their workflow to stop and do the math for what that would mean in a normal person's life. so with 12+1 $200/month claude subscriptions and the one $200/month chatGPT subscription, that's $2,800 a month. He says that's the equivalent of $87,000 a month of token usage.
$2,800/month is more than my rent and utilities, and $87,000 is more than i make in a year. This guys addiction costs more than my annual salary per month for nothing. this is the future of software development where you have to be ridiculously rich to play - where he is also actively pulling the ladder up and saying "don't develop shared libraries" - no more "if you have a laptop and a keyboard you can program," not even a fig leaf to "AI enables nonprogrammers to program."
the vision of the future of programming that's being presented here is literally just "if you have more money than 99.9999% of people on this earth, then you can totally lose your mind"
@jonny Back when tokens were still at their cheapest, my CTO (at least) once accidentally spent well over £1,000 in an afternoon by creating a loop in their agentic data analysis tool. They thought it was a funny story for Show & Tell.
They had built the tool explicitly because we *couldn’t afford* to hire a data analyst for a few weeks to do the work.
I couldn’t help but think about what their response would be if someone *accidentally* spent £1,000 on other, non-AI work.
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THE WHOLE POINT of programming to me is to make things to GIVE THEM AWAY to other people so that they don't have to do them themselves and EVERYONE HAS FREE ACCESS to ANYTHING THEY NEED. the idea that rather than being able to participate in a large and collaborative social space where i can build on my colleagues work I instead rent a private vertical slice of their stolen, soylentized flash frozen expertise to create a completely isolated island of a thing without the expectation that anyone else might take and use it is HELL to me. absolute hell. other people are in fact a feature and not a bug.
@jonny Please do realize the implications. When you say "other people are in fact a feature and not a bug", these people beg to differ. THEY WANT US DEAD. Our very existence is an affront to them. This is not metaphor or hyperbole but literal truth. Since they can't just kill us immediately, they'll settle for depriving us of everything that we feel to be rewarding or fulfilling in life — such as your vision of creating free software in "a large and collaborative social space".
It's the same thinking that led the Nazis to write "Arbeit macht frei" over the gates of their death camps. They didn’t want the prisoners to know that they were slated for death, nor could they execute them immediately when they first entered the camps — but they could put them to work. And that "Arbeit" wasn't anything like your fulfilling collaborative project; it was soul-devouring drudgery. HELL on Earth. The intent was the infliction of living death.
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THE WHOLE POINT of programming to me is to make things to GIVE THEM AWAY to other people so that they don't have to do them themselves and EVERYONE HAS FREE ACCESS to ANYTHING THEY NEED. the idea that rather than being able to participate in a large and collaborative social space where i can build on my colleagues work I instead rent a private vertical slice of their stolen, soylentized flash frozen expertise to create a completely isolated island of a thing without the expectation that anyone else might take and use it is HELL to me. absolute hell. other people are in fact a feature and not a bug.
@jonny I'm not following the logic. Not saying I disagree with you, I'm in agreement with you but for other reasons. The question is if people get more programs for free, isn't that the realisation of your dream? Or is the realisation of your dreams that they go through you to obtain them?
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@david_chisnall @jonny As well as the operating system (scheduler, I/O, filing system, memory management, ect ect) we had to write our own stuff for things like line drawing (IIRC it was the ellipse drawing that was hard work as there are so many special cases, to do with how many eighth-ellipse segments fit entirely within a single pixel).
Once the OS was there, writing applications was much more straightforward, and usually a single person job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68K/OS (that's my handwriting on at least one of the labels)
@TimWardCam @david_chisnall @jonny
The last time I fully understood the working of the hardware and software of a complete microcomputer was the Acorn System 2, (predecessor of the BBC Micro). Even then, the chips themselves were black boxes.
Sophie Wilson (bigger brain than me) probably managed it for the BBC Micro itself. That’s the early 1980s era. It’s been downhill ever since! -
@TimWardCam @david_chisnall @jonny
The last time I fully understood the working of the hardware and software of a complete microcomputer was the Acorn System 2, (predecessor of the BBC Micro). Even then, the chips themselves were black boxes.
Sophie Wilson (bigger brain than me) probably managed it for the BBC Micro itself. That’s the early 1980s era. It’s been downhill ever since!@KimSJ @david_chisnall @jonny One of the chips in the QL - the ZX8302 - wasn't a black box, because David Karlin send me the schematics.
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@jonny I'm not following the logic. Not saying I disagree with you, I'm in agreement with you but for other reasons. The question is if people get more programs for free, isn't that the realisation of your dream? Or is the realisation of your dreams that they go through you to obtain them?
@vruz
The things that are being created are ephemeral, isolated, not able to be stably built on top of, or even stably used. They are not the basis or or continuation of a growing base of software-for-all, but rather vertically integrated islands that are here one day and gone the next.
