davemp

> Similar to zig, odin, and others, its basically just C with some syntax conveniences.

Extremely reductive and untrue. As someone who still writes/deals with C daily, there is room for a successor that still attempts to be a thin wrapper around an abstract CPU. The C type system and preprocessor has some glaring flaws that are not fixable in a backwards compatible way.

1e1,000,000 lines of lean. Just needs human review.

DonHopkins is not a bot. Not sure about the quote though.

No they are not equal. There are a lot of hairy details usually around byte layout/endianness that are defined (sometime implementation defined) that are UB or TBDB in rust. Also rust doesn’t have int overflow UB.

Often that’s just implementation defined behavior which is perfectly safe. You should just put some compilation guards to error out if someone tries to port your code.

TCS being theoretical computer science? I have not seen that acronym before.

Have you written anything low level in Zig? If anything, Zig is lower level than C.

A lot of the “high level assembly” parts of C are actually compiler extensions and not from the C spec.

libc is even worse.

Maybe it’s wishful thinking on my behalf, but I am still not convinced that LLMs are on a path to SciFi levels of apocalyptic malicious super intelligence. Rather LLMs at some level are just all of the humanity’s information rendered accessible in an unprecedented way.

In general trying to regulate information access is a losing battle that invites tyranny. So the goal should be minimal restrictions.

At the end of the day, the threats posed by capable AI tools have to be physical. I think the key threats are the following:

- Internet connected infrastructure being crippled

- Creation of WMDs

- Economic collapse (precipitous devaluation of knowledge work and IP).

I personally think the glory days of the wild west, mostly unregulated internet were already over before LLMs; and we need to take a step back to make something structurally secure. This (expensive) change would stop the irresponsible/malicious actor running a tireless hacking agent in a loop threat model. Even a rogue SciFi tier AI would have a much harder time escaping/propagating with a structurally secure internet.

Enabling WMD creation is scaring, but I don’t think it’s really that big of an issue. Anyone with a sophisticated enough supply chain to create AI data centers is leaps and bounds more advanced than what is required to enrich uranium or synthesize bio weapons. The problem is allowing access to untrusted parties. I think it’s fair enough that individual actors shouldn’t have unregulated access to all of human information (private frontier AI companies included).

The last problem is probably the trickiest, but again could probably be solved by regulation. IP protection is already tricky and I don’t think we should try to get more protectionist.

We really need to figure out how to preserve fulfilling careers (if AI does ever get cost effective enough). I don’t think, say accounting, is inherently more fulfilling than building a house. The problem is concentration of wealth and labor dynamics.

Of course all of this gets way harder if it proves that truly dangerous capabilities can be present in models that can be run on consumer hardware.

I don’t think it’s necessarily tyrannical to have a tier of hardware that’s labeled some equivalent of “weapons grade” and requires strict licensing. Restricted computers is a change from the norm. But I can go buy a shotgun with ease and not an F35 jet.

We’d just need to be careful that we can still have lightly to unregulated computing to a certain point and that access to the capable AIs isn’t restricted to just in groups.

AI at least with its current compute and data requirements seems structurally undemocratic to me.

Completely unrealistic. We could already be working toward such goals without super intelligent AI. I don’t see any reason to assume that ASI created through an evolutionary process would have a different outcome.

If ASI ended up being align-able and not an evolutionary process, why would we assume folks who already are currently in power would change their behavior?

I couldn’t help but notice the parent commenter’s post history. Account from literally before this was called HN, one comment 6 years later, then 13 years later this comment.

The pro lisp/s expression comments check out.

> legacy choices when we quite literally were just not smart enough to be making permanent decisions like this

Unnecessary hubris. I assure you the original ABI authors were plenty smart and just faced a different set of problems.

> Our forebears are either not interested in a world without the mounting, crushing debt or just prefer not to tackle that mess right now

The article mentions the organizational/social part of this problem, but then goes on to drop this turd.

I can also assure you that our forebears were neither malicious or lazy; but faced the same problem this proposal does.

I don’t like seeing such disrespect for the folks who laid out the groundwork for us.

It should be embarrassing and shameful to apply for such a trivial patent.

> A 1963 house is what we'd think of today as a starter home.

Not every house at that time was a post war levitown style shack. AC wasn’t even terribly uncommon in 1960s construction.

Great for rich people or just not your relative purchasing power being completely eroded. Why work for a 5% raise if it means all your expenses go up 5%?